Quotes About Being Published

#1. Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don't even want to run, but, once running, can't help but not want to lose.

Samantha Harvey

#2. I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.

Lynne Tillman

#3. My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.

David Levithan

#4. I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings ... I would have done a novel about a man who hangs around with a gaggle of models.

Gideon Defoe

#5. It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women.

Clive James

#6. I have no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan, now being published for the first time so long after he made his bow upon the stage.

J.M. Barrie

#7. Well I don't write, I attempt to scribble here and there. And no, nothing ever so grand as being published.

Charles Keating

#8. I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.

Richard Curtis

#9. The primary reason more explicit material is now being published is twofold: there's money in the sale of sensational material, and few are trying to stop those who want to make this money, that is, unscrupulous publishers.

Linda Harvey

#10. I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.

Irvine Welsh

#11. For me, just being published feels like success.

Samantha Shannon

#12. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

Melinda Rucker Haynes

#13. For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

Laura Miller

#14. It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important ... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.

Alice Walker

#15. Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.

Etgar Keret

#16. Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing - and finishing - a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.

Garth Nix

#17. The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

James A. Michener

#18. 'being published' is not the same as being a real writer.

Scarlett Thomas

#19. I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published.

James Gunn

#20. I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

Kate Morton

#21. For those of you haven't read the book, it's being published tomorrow

David Frost

#22. I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.

Brian Aldiss

#23. Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.

Kate Atkinson

#24. Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

Jacques Barzun

#25. The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published.

John Farrar

#26. My legislation provides that Net Neutrality rules would have 'no force or effect' and prohibits similar rules from being published or re-issued.

Marsha Blackburn

#27. I feel like a nineteen forties teenager at a Frank Sinatra concert! (On finally being published)

Katrina D. Miller

#28. I decided to write Westerns because there was a terrific market for Westerns in the '50s. There were a lot of pulp magazines, like 'Dime Western' and '10 Story Western' that were still being published. The better ones paid two cents a word. And I thought, 'I like Westerns.'

Elmore Leonard

#29. The way British publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are.

Tibor Fischer

#30. Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.

Raina Telgemeier

#31. Painting for process is the visual equivalent of journal writing, done not for the sake of being seen or published, but purely for the telling itself.

Michele Cassou

#32. I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.

Salman Rushdie

#33. It breaks my heart that we are always being nudged toward the most recently published books, when so many worthy books have gone unexplored.

Cathy Marie Buchanan

#34. I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.

Lynn Abbey

#35. I'm tired of the anonymity of being an unpublished author. I crave the anonymity of being self-published.

Tristan Durie

#36. You let me believe all this time that I bound myself to you in exchange for getting published and being successful." Kathleen's mouth worked around the bitterness of the words. "You assumed that. And you know what they say, when you assume you make an ass out of ...

Rachel Caine

#37. I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.

Jessica Hagedorn

#38. I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.

Piers Anthony

#39. This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo - an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published - a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop.

William Boyd

#40. It's being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it's like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It's not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.

George R R Martin

#41. Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams
what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred
I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.

Anne Lamott

#42. I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

Romesh Gunesekera

#43. Yet again, unscientific claims were being circulated broadly, but the scientists' refutation of them was published where only fellow scientists would see it.

Naomi Oreskes

#44. Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.

Tom Wolfe

#45. When one is being driven to the edge, we either fight back or jump

Dino KF Wong

#46. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

Aaron Swartz

#47. As long as copyright is breached in Iran and international works are being freely published in magazines and newspapers, no one feels any need for Iranian works.

Javad Alizadeh

#48. Dreamers become writers, and for me, being a published writer is a dream come true.

David A. Adler

#49. My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published.

Elena Ferrante

#50. 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.

Ian Rankin

#51. If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.

Trenton Lee Stewart

#52. 'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.

Pamela Sargent

#53. Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society ... loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#54. I think it's very, very, very hard to get a book published. I never want to be one of those teachers that say, 'don't do this, ' because how sad would the world be if people didn't create art and write? But, it's not an easy journey being a writer.

Alyson Richman

#55. 'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

Annalee Newitz

#56. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.

Bei Dao

#57. Before and after my debut, I've helped out other manga artists from time to time, but I have no experience of being exclusively an assistant. Nor have I done individual or self-published manga.

Natsuki Takaya

#58. I found myself immediately attracted to Pope John Paul II when, upon his election to the Papacy, his published speeches invariably called attention to the need for recognizing the dignity of the human being as a child of God.

Robert H. Schuller