After Quote by Chang-Rae Lee

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had…

— Akhil Sharma

I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything…

— Jonathan Coe

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was…

— William Nicholson

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of…

— E. O. Wilson

I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that,…

— Mordecai Richler

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

— Bret Easton Ellis

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

— Rainbow Rowell

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn't very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a…

— David Grann

I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher…

— Jackie Collins

I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I…

— Philipp Meyer

My first novel was a critical success in a matter of weeks.

— Christine Leunens

When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.

— Naomi Alderman