Patrick White Quotes

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.

I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.

I had no plans to be a writer. My teenaged bid for stardom was to be a pop star... which, ahem, didn't exactly work out.

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

I didn't expect any success at all. I was rejected by every publisher in the world and every agent in town.

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

I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.

I was not a successful TV comedy writer.

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

By no means did my first book sell. I took a few runs at it. You'll never see those early efforts 'cause they're burned, straight to the fireplace where they belong.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

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

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

I've sold scripts in the past, and also a TV pilot that didn't get made, to Fox. But yeah, I've been writing for a while.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.