Abandoned Quote by Seth Grahame-Smith

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

— Mark Haddon

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

— Salman Rushdie

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers…

— Amos Oz

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over…

— Anita Diament

I see a great lack of stories around. I bought six literary magazines and looked through them to see what people were doing. There…

— Keith Johnstone

I was a terrible writer at first.

— Gabby Barrett

I wrote the worst novel ever.

— Sophie Ellis-Bextor

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

“All books are good,’ he said. ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘I’ve read some really bad books.’ I was thinking specifically of Anne of…

— Lisa Jewell

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting…

— William S. Burroughs

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or…

— Gail Godwin

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