Literary Challenges Quotes

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

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.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

It's difficult for writers in the theatre. It's difficult for writers in the theatre.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it.

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.

Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.

At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

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.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.