Writing Success Quotes

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

When I ventured into writing at the age of 17, I wanted to be a good and successful writer. I just wanted to write good stuff - poems, prose, stories, essays, everything.

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.

I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful.

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

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

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.

I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I'd lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

To make anything successful, you need a good writer.

The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.

My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.

I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.