Tama Janowitz Quotes

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

Every time I had a book come out, I'm like, 'Is it going to be number one?'

I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.

I am actually hoping to write a series of books! The Amazon was the first one I got finished and have managed to get published! I have plenty more ideas up my sleeve!

When the new country came out ten to 15 years ago, people my age were almost too old. But it never stopped me. I never stopped writing. I never stopped recording.

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

I'm attracted to good writing. When I read the page and I know what we're after and where we're headed, and I'm fortunate enough to respect that idea and am able to pitch myself toward that, that feels like the culmination of everything that I've spent my life trying to do, since I played that tree in that play in third grade.

In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.

You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

At some point, my body will collapse. But I hope that my brain will still be working so that I can carry on with writing.

I didn't think [Ella Enchanted] would get published. Everything I'd written till then had been rejected. If it was published, I thought it might sell a few thousand copies and go out of print. I thought if I was lucky I could write more books and get them published, too. I still pinch myself over the way things have worked out.

I couldn't have opened a store without putting books with the clothes. I am still writing as I have always done, and have published my ninth book "L'envers à l'endroit" last year. I am currently working on a dictionary of my favourite words.

I'm always writing, the past 10 years. A lot has changed, in that it's something I do every day.

If you want to be a rock star, you're not going to just walk on stage. You gotta go practice in the garage until your fingers bleed. I always say that - the same with writing and the same with filmmaking - if it's really your passion, you've just got to stick with it and do it.