Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.

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

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

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.

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

I've written a lot of books in my time, and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

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.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.

I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

I want to write a best-selling book.

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.

Criticism is part of being in the marketplace. If you can't take a bit of criticism, you shouldn't bother publishing a book.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

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.

When I first started working on 'Staying Dead,' I got some well-meaning but negative feedback from industry folk because - back in 2001 - epic fantasy was still the big thing, alternate history a tight runner-up.