Author Frustration Quotes

I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.

I kept getting offered all this young adult stuff. I don't want to keep telling teen coming-of-age stories!

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

If anyone ever wonders why there's nothing coming from me, it's not my fault. I'm doing the work. No, I haven't deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can't get anything into print. And apparently I'm not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, "I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can't publish it -- I've been told I mustn't." The indication is that I'm not writing what people want to read, but I never did.

I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

There are people out there who would enjoy my books but wouldn't pick them up because they think it's not going to be for them. I find it infuriating.There's a lot more going on in my books than just romance.

My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids' books.

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.

I've sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn't capture the characters.

I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.

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

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

Make them do as you want them to," she said. "I can’t," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.

I always have the impression that I write the same book.

These days, people like me who are in the arts are perceived as celebrity writers. That really makes me angry because I expend a great deal of effort and spend an enormous amount of time on my books. And I've been writing now for 35 years.

The first interviews I gave were entirely unpleasant. You have people trying to trip you up with impolite questions that have nothing to do with the books. It's simply vulgar curiosity, and I won't have it.