Publish Novel Quotes & Sayings

I've been associated with Macmillan for over 45 years. I'd like to thank them for their continued commitment to my backlist and I look forward to continuing to work with them as they publish my next novel, 'Vicious Circle' in 2013. — Wilbur Smith

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single. — James Lee Burke

Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

He says: 'The capitalistic world killed the artist in me.' He sees as coming from outside all that comes from inside. I know the artist in him must have been very weak to be defeated by this obstacle at all. Limitations, restrictions, defeats, come from within. I am fully responsible for my own restrictions. — Anais Nin

In the '60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I'd written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies. — Wes Craven

Now they were lawyers and investment bankers, with faces creased and drawn by the skirmish of daily life. Others I'd known well, and as we inched perilously closer to the casket, our talk evidenced a shared fondness for Rob but also something else shared in our own receding dreams. There was Ty and his dermatology career, me and my struggles to publish a second novel, former history majors who were doing their best to remain in school forever. Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he'd thought he would make, inhabiting the home he'd thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he'd thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier. — Jeff Hobbs

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling. — Karen Thompson Walker

And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? Your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it? — George Gissing

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish. — Neil Gaiman

Small things lead to big changes. — Allen Hershkowitz

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse — Sylvia Plath

I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre. — Philipp Meyer

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel. — Sara Paretsky

* I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT. — Stephen King

A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me. — Rebecca McNutt

In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see. — Robert Pinsky

Some readers sort of suspect that you have another book that you didn't publish that has even more information in it. I think that readers sort of want to be taught something. They have this idea that there's a takeaway from a novel rather than just the being there, which I think is the great, great pleasure of reading. — Alice McDermott

My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad. — Rick Yancey

I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now. — Jim Woodring

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think. — Marlene Van Niekerk

The Drowned Cities hadn't always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn't belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond. — Paolo Bacigalupi

There is no reason for the fish to love the fisherman! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea. — Daniel Handler

Writers live with fear. Some writers cannot deal with the fear, and so they quit or refuse to publish. In order to write, you must either ignore the fear or trick it into leaving you alone. The fear is very sly, though and hard to trick. The fear in writing comes from exposing your thoughts, your emotions, your experiences, your ideas, your talent, your intelligence and ultimately your self to public scrutiny and possible scorn. The fear is by no means groundless. You have opened yourself up to the possibility of public humiliations...I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest novel ever written isn't gathering dust in some filing cabinet somewhere, simply because its author could not overcome the fear of having it published. — Patrick F. McManus

His mind is trying to catch the thought as a cat tries to catch a shadow. — Jerry Spinelli

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. — Terry Brooks

You just haven't found the right girl," Clare said. "She'll come along." "And then she'll make a run for the hills." Cass laughed at her own joke. — Jayde Scott