Writer Struggles Quotes

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

It's hard enough to be a lady writer. Doubly hard to be a funny lady writer.

If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.

Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps ... they're either one or the other! ... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder! ... they stand condemned! ... the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!

I didn't expect any success at all. I was rejected by every publisher in the world and every agent in town.

I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.

When you are a writer the assist-to-turnover ratio...there are a lot more turnovers than assists. It's just the nature of the beast.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

I'm not a very good writer. I'm working at it.

I don't have a stack of scripts that, when I get home, studios are clamoring, saying, 'Has Bob read ours yet?'

Most writers, in my opinion, are dysfunctional derelicts.

You're gambling with something vital. Most writers get smashed egos.

Why do the lives of writers seem so... train-wrecky?

I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler?

Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.

The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you're trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it.

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 see so many talented writers of color struggling to get their work out to an audience. I know that's the case for all writers - everyone's struggling for attention - but I do think that for writers of color it's harder, and for women it's harder, and for regional writers it's harder, too.

I think the essence of the argument has always been, first of all, the Guild doesn't want writing on spec. And that's been a major problem over the years. But obviously, to the young writer that's unfair and it's discriminatory, and it can be very hurtful to one's career.

I wrote for free for, like, fifteen years; I could redo my parlor in rejection slips. It would be surprisingly tasteful - they use nice paper.

I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.