Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
My father was a very prolific writer and he left behind a huge body of unpublished work.
I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.
The first time I met Harlan Ellison, we were both unpublished young punks in Cleveland, Ohio.
Agents will read unpublished work because they might make money, and that's their job. It isn't mine.
Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid?
I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.
All alone in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing.
The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.
My entire life consisted of musings, calculations, practical works, and trials. Many questions remain unanswered; many works are incomplete or unpublished. The most important things still lie ahead.
The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.
Every writer, no matter published, unpublished, award-winning, or bestselling, faces insecurity. It crops up everywhere and, in my personal experience, nearly every day. It's just a part of the process.
Yes, there's still much good journalism to be found, if you know where to look. Yet, ask reporters who've been around a while, and many will tell you that a lot of good journalism is being left unpublished.
You don't sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag's editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't admire Susan's own fiction.
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people out there toiling over your unpublished manuscript, trying to make your way across that vast ocean in a bathtub, I can only say this to you: keep paddling. Well, either that or start vlogging.
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.
Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of 'thinker', with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won't really do.
Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.
It's a lot harder for an author that's unpublished to say, 'Hey, here's a new book.' There's nothing of theirs to read, so you don't know what it's going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.
As an unpublished, nonprofessional writer working on my first novel, I nevertheless had access to extremely talented people who would help make my manuscript better, people who've made careers out of providing careful, constructive criticism to writers. I'm tremendously grateful to them.
The hardest thing about being an unpublished writer is that there's always that voice in your head that asks if you're really being a fool. You might just really stink and not know it. You have to have a lot of blind faith in the process. You have to like it so much that you're going to do it anyway.
Cotton Mather's publications in his own lifetime amounted to more than 400 titles, and his magnum opus, on which he labored most of his life, remains unpublished: a commentary on every verse of every book of the Bible. Anyone who leaves that kind of record behind issues an irresistible invitation to historians.
When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call After Midnight,' to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented.
When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together.
'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.