Competitive Writing Quotes

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.

Editors, for the most part, don't care ''what'' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they.

I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.

I'm probably better known for boxing with Hemingway than for anything I've written.

You can't go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one.

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.

I remember that the single most vicious letter I ever read was the letter Hemingway wrote Scribners when they asked him to give a blurb for From Here to Eternity. It's there, in the Selected Letters for all to read, an example of a once great writer at his very worst. I doubt that he ever forgave Scribners for publishing James Jones in the first place. War, as Hemingway saw it, belonged to him.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

Even my Mormon sister checks my rankings on Amazon.com.

I don't care to read about Garrison Keillor. We cover the same sort of territory, and I don't need to know anything more about him.

When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.