Literary Representation Quotes

Getting an agent is hard, and I also think people rush to get an agent too soon.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

I think boys don't always like to read books with female protagonist - I don't even know what to say about this.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

There's a thriving field of self-published stuff in, particularly, black fiction. I don't know that other groups of people of color have that same recourse.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

I just went and got an agent because I thought I can create my own world - you can't right your own life, but you can escape to a world where you can have control.

Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

I'm incredibly pleased to be working with Marco Palmieri and Tor Books on 'The Geek Feminist Revolution.' This was an exciting book to pitch and is proving to be a lot of fun to put together.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

When my mother read 'The Joy Luck Club', she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

August Wilson is the one writer that writes about men like my father, who had a fifth grade education, who was a janitor at McDonald's.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.