Quotes About Writing

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

I write as a matter of need - seven books and God knows how many short stories before anyone published me.

I never thought my ideas would actually get published.

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids' books.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

When I wrote the first Betsy book, 'Undead and Unwed,' I had no idea, none, that it would be a career-defining, genre-defining book, the first of over a dozen in the series, the first of over 70 published books, the first on my road to the best-seller list, the first on my road to being published in 15 countries.

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.

I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.

I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

I wrote three books before I got one published. Most writers do. Have faith, and know that with each work you are getting better.

My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.

I was lucky in getting my first book published; my first book was 'Bunnicula,' which I wrote with my late wife Debbie, for the fun of it.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

I've had over a dozen and a half novels published since late 1994 when my first novel, 'Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls' came out.

At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'

The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.

If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.

When the Bible was first published, bathhouses were mandatory, no one could read, and only the people in the Church could write.

My first published work was when I was 19, in 'Playgirl.' It was an odd experience but exciting.

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.