Robert Orben Quotes

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

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.

For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

Publishing can be tough. It has the ability to kill dreams.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

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.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than it is to traditionally publish, but in all honesty, it's harder to be a best seller self-publishing than it is with a house.

Having books published is very destructive to writing.

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

I didn't say I have to be a writer, but I did say that I needed to publish at least one book.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

The Internet is a sketch show.

As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.

I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road.

It is difficult to survive as an author in Sweden, so for commercial success, it is good idea to write crime, get yourself translated, and live happily ever after.

I would have been an essayist in the 18th century. Maybe I'd have had one gag in the piece, but essentially I'd be saying something.

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.