Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few e… - Caitlín R. Kiernan
" "No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few exceptions, a brutal, ugly, and unrelentingly difficult existence. It is a grind, no matter how much you may love to write or feel driven to tell stories. Personal demons aside, you will encounter at almost every turn no shortage of idiots and shitheels upon whom you must depend to get your work to readers. Occasionally, there will be a fortunate aberration: a wonderful, brilliant editor, or a copyeditor who doesn't try to express herhimitself vicariously by attempting to rewrite your work, or an agent who busts hisherits ass for you. You may even be so fortunate as to encounter a publisher who cares more about herhisits authors than the bottom line. Those things do happen. But don't ever fucking count on it. If you come to this life, and if you "make it" and can actually eek out some sort of living writing, you will likely learn these things for yourselves. Plenty of people will tell you I'm full of shit on this account. And you are certainly free to listen to whomever you please. But after fourteen years as a full-time writer, during which time I have had great successes and profound failures, seen modest fortune and considerable poverty and everything in-between, been appreciated and reviled, awarded and ignored, helped and hindered — one thing remains true. It's a tough row to hoe, as my Grandfather Ramey would have said. And you do yourself and all working authors a disservice if you dare believe otherwise.
English
Collect this quote
About Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan (born 26 May 1964) is an Irish-born American author, paleontologist, and prolific blogger perhaps most famous for the novels The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and The Red Tree. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan
•
Caitlin R. Kiernan
•
Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan
•
Kathleen Tierney
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Caitlín R. Kiernan
"Consider," she said, "what it is, a unicorn. It is the incarnation of purity, an avatar of innocence. And here is the power of the talisman, for that state of grace which soon passes from each and every one is forever locked inside the horn, the horn become the phallus. And in the instant that it brought you, Natalie, to orgasm, you knew again that innocence, the bliss of a child before it suffers corruption."
I didn't interrupt her, but all at once I got the gist.
"Still, you are only a mortal woman, so what negligible, insignificant sins could you have possibly committed during your short life? Likewise, whatever calamities and wrongs have been visited upon your flesh or your soul, they are trifles. But if you survived the war in Paradise, if you refused the yoke and so are counted among the exiles, then you've persisted down all the long eons. You were already broken and despoiled billions of years before the coming of man. And your transgressions outnumber the stars.
"Now," she asked, "what would you pay, were you so cursed, to know even one fleeting moment of that stainless, former existence?
Chance smiled back at him, and “Well, can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I’m learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read it.
Loading...