Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

When you write a book, you are asking someone to make an investment in their time and money. A column can come and go as the weeks pass, but a book needs to be timeless.

I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

Everybody writes a book too many.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book.

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.

Agents will read unpublished work because they might make money, and that's their job. It isn't mine.

I've always defined myself not as a cartoonist, but as an entrepreneur. That was true before I tried cartooning. I always imagined cartooning would be how I got my seed capital. I always thought my other businesses would be the less dominant part of my life.

If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

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.

I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

Planet Lucy Press? I incorporated myself to deal with publishing and was calling myself Big Bang Incorporated, which of course has to do with the Big Bang at the beginning of creation.

Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.

You rarely get money out of labels, except for when they open up a budget for a project. Other than that, it's a do-or-die type thing.

Not only are there no free lunches, but there are no free systemic changes either.

The one thing which we were left almost wholly without, during the war, was literature. Nobody thought of importing books through the blockade, to any adequate extent, and the facilities for publishing them, even if we had had authors to write them, were very poor indeed.

The normal reaction of a publisher when faced with an author with a bee in his bonnet is to grab the check and run.

My mother obviously was in the publishing business.

Children's publishing is the jewel in the crown of British publishing.

We, the authors, want people to buy books. That is the only way we can earn - from our royality.