Putting out a book is absolutely a lesson in vulnerability because it doesn't matter how much of an audience you have. Some people who have giant audiences can't sell books because those audiences don't feel like they need to give them their money.
I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.
My first book was so horrible I have deleted all copies of it. Thankfully, it was before the Internet, so there are no lurking caches of it anywhere.
Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.
My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
I wrote the worst novel ever.
The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.
My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.
I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.
The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
