Unsuccessful Writing Quotes

I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.

My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.

I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

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.

I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.

I was writing full time after quitting a job as a high school English teacher, and I hadn't been able to sell anything, and my bank account was down to zero, and all of my friends were like 'What are you doing in the basement, when are you going to get a real job?', and my parents thought I'd completely lost it.

If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.

Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.

I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.

So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.

My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision.

The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.

I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.

A lot of writing's going down dead ends that don't go anywhere.

I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn't very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.