Top 100 My First Book Quotes
#1. I really absolutely loved writing my first book.
Jill Davis
#2. For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
James M. Barrie
#3. I worked in videogames for 16 years before writing my first book in 2009.
Margaret Stohl
#4. I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
Jonathan Galassi
#5. I had always presumed that my first book would be published, but I never dreamt that I would write 15 bestsellers and have this wonderful life in America that I have entirely built for myself.
Jane Green
#6. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue
#7. My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.
Patrick DeWitt
#8. I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket.
Philipp Meyer
#9. My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said, 'You might do this or that,' or 'Why don't we see more of this.' I merely took the book and published it.
James Salter
#10. One professor in college told me flat out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out.
Ellen Potter
#12. When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.
Rabih Alameddine
#13. My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.
Judith Rossner
#14. My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.
Joe Meno
#15. My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.
Chris Crutcher
#16. As a very small boy, my passion was nature, and I had pets - cats, a dog and a bunny rabbit - and I wrote a very small book called 'My Pets,' filled with their photographs and a discussion about my pets and how much I loved them ... That was my first book.
Tony Buzan
#17. All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, 'Who am I?' And I wrote my first book to deal with that, 'The Ragman's Son.'
Kirk Douglas
#18. My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.
Gary Shteyngart
#19. I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
Howard Nemerov
#20. In 2007, I sold my first book, 'Grimspace.' It says it's SF on the spine. I believe it to be SF, though it's certainly written differently. I write in first person, present tense, and the protagonist is a woman with a woman's thoughts, feelings, and sexual desires.
Ann Aguirre
#21. I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn't make a penny, I worked so hard, didn't drink, didn't enjoy life.
Orhan Pamuk
#22. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.
Ishmael Reed
#23. Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#24. I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.
Ed Emberley
#25. My first book deal was actually for a textbook - 'Judo and You' - that I wrote while teaching at Temple University. A scout for Kendall-Hunt came looking for someone to write the book, and even though it wasn't a course I was teaching there, I agreed to write it.
Jonathan Maberry
#26. I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing.
Claire Tomalin
#27. My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.
Alton Brown
#28. People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.
Gayle Forman
#29. While researching my first book, I discovered so many fascinating tidbits that I wanted to share them with readers to remind them that while the book was fiction, the situations were based on historical realities - some of which were pretty hard to believe.
Julie Klassen
#30. I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.
Daniel Tammet
#31. I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.
Leon Uris
#32. I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.
Jerry Spinelli
#33. I wrote my first book, I published it in 1955, it was in Jiddish and it was called And The World Was Silent.
Elie Wiesel
#34. My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
Ben Marcus
#35. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
Paul Theroux
#36. I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.
Cynthia Voigt
#37. When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.
Candice Millard
#38. Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.
Patrick Modiano
#39. Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'
Robert M. Pirsig
#40. My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
#41. My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
John Burnside
#42. My first book was rejected nine times. It turned out to be a best seller, Battle Cry? in 1953.
Leon Uris
#43. I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.
A. Scott Berg
#44. I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'
Gail Sheehy
#45. I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.
Jackie Collins
#46. I wrote my first book in a toilet in a factory where I was a floor sweeper.
Geoff Thompson
#47. I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#48. I'm still driven by the feeling I had when I wrote my first book or read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle adventure.
Kate Klise
#49. I always wanted to be a writer since I was around 12 years old and I wrote my first book.
Cassandra Clare
#50. I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.
Jami Attenberg
#51. There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
Edward Hirsch
#52. In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children's children.
Oliver North
#53. 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.
Andy Weir
#54. I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
David Sedaris
#55. Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all.
Bill Bryson
#56. Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
Tom Wolfe
#57. I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
Jim Harrison
#58. I can always track my career by the children - I started writing right after the 14-year-old was born, and sold my first book just in time to pay for the birth of the 12-year-old.
Heather Graham Pozzessere
#59. Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.
Mark Billingham
#60. It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.
Paulo Coelho
#61. When I wrote my first book I was asked to write another. After one hundred, everyone asked me to stop and do something else. After two hundred, I lost all my friends and my girlfriend too.
Robin Sacredfire
#62. When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children
L. Frank Baum
#63. My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.
Natalie Babbitt
#65. My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
Kate Thompson
#66. It wasn't until after college that I started writing. I had just applied randomly for jobs in the media and got one on a magazine called 'Pensions World.' So I was writing for a living there and that's when I started my first book.
Sophie Kinsella
#67. The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
John McGahern
#68. In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.
Nick Harkaway
#69. After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
Iris Chang
#70. If I hadn't been able to get my first book published, I am not sure what I would have done.
Sara Sheridan
#71. Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.
Alafair Burke
#72. My first book was called 'Buried Dreams,' about a serial-killer, which was probably about ten years ahead of the serial-killer curve. It was a national bestseller, but it was three years of living in the sewer of this guy's mind.
Tim Cahill
#73. Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum."
Amy Hempel
#74. Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief
Friedrich Nietzsche
#75. 'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.
Joe Abercrombie
#76. In my first book, 'A Return to Love', I wrote about things in the outer world that need to change - how we need to ameliorate deep poverty, heal the earth, end war.
Marianne Williamson
#77. Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
Kent Haruf
#78. I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since.
Michael Scott
#79. The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
Nick Flynn
#80. I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.
Dinaw Mengestu
#81. My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.
Darin Strauss
#82. I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.
Virginia Henley
#83. Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don't get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.
Caroline Lawrence
#84. I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.
Rebecca Stead
#85. I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
Gore Vidal
#86. Conspiracies fascinate me. When I visited the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar before writing my first book, I remember thinking that the person enshrined there was no ordinary mortal. History is rife with mysteries, and that visit ignited a fire to unveil some of them.
Ashwin Sanghi
#87. I had just turned 28 and sold my first book, a travel guide for vegetarians, but I'd tell people about the day job that I didn't care about instead - I placed banner advertisements on the web for a search engine company.
James Bernard Frost
#88. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#89. When I sold my first book, 'A Conspiracy of Tall Men,' it was part of a two-book deal. It wasn't hugely lucrative, but it was enough money for me to quit the paralegal job I had in San Francisco.
Noah Hawley
#90. When I was 19 years old, I wrote my first book. I took a computer science class, and the book was garbage. I thought I could write a better one, so I did.
Jim McKelvey
#91. I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.
David Sedaris
#92. I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book ... and I began putting more work into environmental history.
Jared Diamond
#93. My first book was the most successful debut novel in the U.K. ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the U.K. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.
Kathy Reichs
#94. My first book, 'Contest,' had a guy fighting aliens in the New York Public Library. The second book, 'Ice Station,' and 'Temple' were present-day military thrillers.
Matthew Reilly
#95. For me, even in my first book, the pleasures of writing anything magical is that it has to be physical. It has to be grounded and very much in this world. Then, I get to play with all the consequences of this new thing.
Aimee Bender
#96. I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#97. My first book of stories was 'Satan in the Suburbs'. The title story was in part suggested to me by a stranger whom I met in Mortlake and who, when he saw me, crossed the road and made the sign of the Cross as he went.
Bertrand Russell
#98. I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.
C.S. Lewis
#99. I wrote my first book when I was 22 years old. I have a way with words and I love to write. I can write without getting writers block so I knew, it was a gift.
Tony Gaskins
#100. I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office.
William Joyce
