Books Quote by Gail Godwin

I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of…

— Lauren Groff

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough…

— Mark Haddon

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense…

— Russell Banks

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years,…

— Jenny Offill

I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be…

— William Monahan

I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen…

— Eoin Colfer

I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of…

— John Lescroart

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

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the…

— Chang-Rae Lee

The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out…

— George R. R. Martin

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

— Mark Haddon