Literary Disappointment Quotes

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benovelent deity trying to save us from another Titan.

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

Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.

I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.

Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.

I wrote the worst novel ever.

It's tricky turning a book into a movie. Sometimes people love the book so much that no adaptation lives up to what they imagined. You can avoid that disappointment by never, ever reading books.

'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for for it turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.

Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.

Some books are like an hors d'oeuvre - light, tasty and leaving you longing for the main course which is never going to come - and some are like Christmas lunch immediately after a cooked breakfast.

I wanted to be an artist after all, and my teachers told me these were the best authors the 20th century had to offer. But these books sucked. They were so boring and sloppy and plotless. And Bob Dylan's lyrics seemed nonsensical to me - almost like he had just gotten high and written down whatever random thoughts occurred to him.

Of all unfortunate men one of the unhappiest is a middling author endowed with too lively a sensibility for criticism.

The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.

You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.

You get to be a certain age and you start reading stuff about the age you are, and you think, what is wrong with these people who are writing these books? Do they not have necks?

I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report's criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash... knowing I'd remember every word.

In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer, whose excellent novel 'Endless Love' had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie.

I have SO many books I didn't sell. Some my agent rejected outright, others made it all the way to my editor to be turned away. Not everything is a winner, which is tough when you've devoted eight or nine months of your life to something.

I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. That seems to be hopeless; once you see that you lose all hope.

I used to think all poets were Byronic Mad, bad and dangerous to know. And then I met a few. See Lamb 486:25.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.