author's frustration Quotes

After 'Kidulthood,' I was called in to a meeting and told that I didn't write women very well. I was very annoyed.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

If anyone ever wonders why there's nothing coming from me, it's not my fault. I'm doing the work. No, I haven't deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can't get anything into print. And apparently I'm not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, "I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can't publish it -- I've been told I mustn't." The indication is that I'm not writing what people want to read, but I never did.

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.

the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.

The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.

I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.

Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk.

What I wish is that people would look beyond the tribbles and see I've written some other books that I really would like people to notice. There's 'The Man Who Folded Himself,' there's 'The Martian Child,' which is about my son and the adoption. There's 'The War Against The Chtorr,' which is my magnum opus, my great epic story.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.