Quotes & Sayings About Getting Published

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given. — Salman Rushdie

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference. — John Sayles

I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would. — David Sedaris

The cruise was the conduit for what would become my third book. While I was traveling and writing for ctnow, women across the United States and from the Caribbean emailed not to ask about my geographic journey but my existential one. "How do you find the courage to travel on your own?" they wondered. "How do you keep from getting lonely? Don't you feel self-conscious eating out alone?" After the first 30 emails like these I thought, There's a book here. It would be eight years before I published Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road. But the inspiration for publication came during the cruise. — Gina Greenlee

I'm a tattoo artist, and I went to school to paint, and I started writing and getting published. — David Labrava

Buy the 25th anniversary version, I would have told you. It's got a long intro by yours truly where I explain a lot about the Morgenstern estate and the horrible legal problems I've had with them. That version is still out there and what you are interested in is the same thing that I am interested in - namely, at last, getting Buttercup's Baby published. I — William Goldman

While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an "A," as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published. — Denise Duhamel

One thing I learned is that the park by the river in a recent story, 'Getting Closer,' is the same park by the river that appears for a moment near the end of 'The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,' a story first published 23 years earlier. This echo at first irritated me, then pleased me deeply. — Steven Millhauser

In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We're getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It's no myth! — Christopher Dines

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer. — Nicole Krauss

I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing: — Diana Wynne Jones

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

I'd stopped being grandiose. I'd lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I'd-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. — Cheryl Strayed

People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience. — Eileen Myles

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me. — Lisa Alther

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die. — Boria Sax

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego. — Joseph Brodsky

Democrats were simply hoping to win some political points by getting their outlandish rhetoric published in the newspapers and heard on the talk shows. — John Doolittle

Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it. — Janet Evanovich

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out. — Stephen King

At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everything that many of you graduates are hoping for
except for the money. I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled
all the things that the culture tells you, from preschool on, will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you. I got some stature, the respect of other writers, even a low-grade fame. The culture says these things will save you, as long as you also manage to keep your weight down. But the culture lies. — Anne Lamott

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

I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along. — Piers Anthony

You let me believe all this time that I bound myself to you in exchange for getting published and being successful." Kathleen's mouth worked around the bitterness of the words. "You assumed that. And you know what they say, when you assume you make an ass out of ... — Rachel Caine

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there. — Aleksandar Hemon

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next. — Ibn Warraq

I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English). — Deborah Smith

Getting published is a matter of luck. The more we rewrite, the luckier we get. — Pierre Van Rooyen

The dirty little secret about comics is that the wall to getting published is actually not that high. You can publish your own comic. You can have your comic printed by the same people that print Marvel and DC and Image's comics for, I think, it's about $2,000 for a print run. So you can Kickstart it and get your own comic made. It depends on what is considered success to you. So if you need to be published by the Big Two to feel that you've made it, well, you should start working very hard. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable. — Romesh Gunesekera

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

I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway. — Anne Lamott

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets. — Erica Jong

I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to support myself. — William Sleator

The hardest thing about writing a novel is getting it published. — Marianne Cushing

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver. — Anne Lamott

It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day. — Benjamin Percy

In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that not only introduced the word bit in print but established a field of study today known as information theory. Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously. — Charles Petzold

Battles over job and career, over every picture published. She had never been ambitious out of vanity. All she ever wanted was to escape from her mother's world. Yes, she saw it with absolute clarity: no matter how enthusiastic she was about taking pictures, she could just as easily have turned her enthusiasm to any other endeavour. Photography was nothing but a way of getting at 'something higher' and living beside Thomas. — Milan Kundera

I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents. — Jami Attenberg

Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun. — Heather Grace Stewart

There's no "correct path" to becoming a real artist. You might think you'll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it's all bullshit, and it's all in your head. You're an artist when you say you are. And you're a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected. — Amanda Palmer

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do. — Hilary Mantel

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one. — Denise Mina

I have actually programmed a fair bit in Perl, like I have C++ code published with my name on it. Other things I have tried and have no intention to do again if I can at all avoid it include smoking, getting drunk enough to puke and waste the whole next day with hang-over, breaking a leg in a violent car crash, getting mugged in New York City, or travel with Aeroflot. — Erik Naggum

People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal. — Nell Zink

Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book 'Getting Started in Electronics,' published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s and had a blast making the projects in it. When I was editor-in-chief of 'MAKE,' I asked Forrest to write a column for the magazine, called 'The Backyard Scientist.' — Mark Frauenfelder

In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know. — Marie Rutkoski

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing." — Sylvia Plath

How did we get here? How, like Tootle the Train, did we get so off track? Perhaps it's time to revisit these beloved stories and start all over again. Trying to figure out where you belong, like Scuffy the Tugboat? Maybe, as time marches on, you're beginning to feel that you resemble the Saggy Baggy Elephant.
Or perhaps your problems are more sweeping. Like the Poky Little Puppy, do you seem to be getting into trouble rather often and missing out on the strawberry shortcake of life? Maybe this book can help you! After all, Little Golden Books were first published during the dark days of World War II, and they've been comforting people during trying times ever since - while gently teaching us a thing or two. And they remind us that we've had the potential to be wise and content all along. — Diane Muldrow

I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life. — Jeffrey Eugenides

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages. — Jeffery Taylor

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework. — Iain Banks

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books? — Gao Xingjian

The whole process of getting a book published is just part of the process. The last of the process that I enjo — Victoria Chang

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published. — Fred Saberhagen

My books should feel like you're getting a peek into a private world: a diary no one was meant to read. As soon as I start thinking, 'This book is going to be published,' my drawing becomes calculated and deliberate. It's one of the ways I trick myself. — Jeffrey Brown

I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works. — Richard K. Morgan

The three secrets of getting published:

1. Never give up!
2. Never give up!
3. Never give up!

It doesn't matter how many rejection letters you get. Remember, you only need one acceptance letter. — Marshall S. Thomas

Ultimately, I'm in the fitness industry. But, I've branched out from there quite a bit. I began doing consulting on writing and getting published in magazines in about 2011. Right around that time, I started doing some angel investing and looking to grow my skills and general experience outside of that. — John Romaniello

From the very beginning, I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting published and continue to write what I wanted to without compromising. — M.J. Rose

Write a million words before thinking about getting published. — Carol Berg

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published. — Dan Simmons

I wasn't even in a newspaper office where I was getting assignments in competition with other people. I remember earlier, though, that I knew a young woman who had been published in the New Yorker, and I was so jealous of her. It wasn't exactly a personal competition. I just envied that accomplishment. — Gloria Steinem

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me. — Stephen King

Most writers, including myself, had to endure a lot of rejections before finally getting published. You could wallpaper a sizeable bathroom with the rejection slips I have received. Don't ever give up! — Jonathan Weeks

The Internet's abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing - including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge. — David Weinberger

Some people have an unrealistic expectation when it comes to getting published; the fact is most publishers will turn down your work which is why you need to be persistent. — Judith Guest

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. — James Howe