Book Failure Quotes

My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.

It would absolutely suck if you paid a few bucks for a book only to find that on the first page it said, 'Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after' and the rest of the book was blank.

....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.

I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.

there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.