Literary Endeavor Quotes

I will write a couple of books and become a millionaire.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn't think I could read, much less write.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.

I didn't write a book. It wasn't for self-enrichment.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

My first novel was a challenge to myself. No one had an inkling that I was working on it.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

We sold 400 books of poetry and thought we were well on the way to immortality.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.