Thomas Hauser Quotes

My biggest luck was the Terry McMillan era, because what happened after the phenomenon of 'Waiting to Exhale' is that publishing woke up. They said, 'Wow. Black people do read.'

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

Some people are just so happy to get published to, they sign anything. Next thing you know, they've signed over the rights to their book.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

I'd only been in the business three or four years, but I told myself that someday I'd like to be Mort Janklow.

I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

I never thought my ideas would actually get published.

We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there's very little we can do about that.

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

There are writers who go their whole lives and never hit that No. 1 spot.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don't even want to run, but, once running, can't help but not want to lose.

The best compliment came from Knopf's Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, 'Adam, I read 'Mr. Peanut' in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn't happen often.'

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.

I don't sign contracts for my books.

I didn't make 'The New York Times' bestseller list until 'Charmed Thirds,' and then again for 'Fourth Comings.' It gave me a certain validation, and it certainly helps position me for future books, but it's not something I think about on a daily basis.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.

I call Algonquin Books 'the gods and goddesses of publishing.' Not only did they give me a career, they care deeply about every writer in their flock.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.