Natalie Babbitt Quotes

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

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

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

I don't get on with novelists, don't enjoy their company. Once you've worked for a publisher, you understand the species, see them in their natural habitat, and it's not always pretty.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

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.

You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

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.

I think what's happening with book advances is something that most of the world just doesn't fully appreciate, especially when it comes to nonfiction, because writing a book of investigative journalism is an expensive endeavor, and the system works best if you have publishers making bets on authors.

I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.