Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened.
“Sincere thanks to all the publishers who rejected my manuscripts. Rejection is the reason behind the creation of this book.”
The Indian Story of an Author (2018)
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Gaurav Sharma (author) 27
Author and novelist 1992Related quotes
“The rejection is often not because of the reasons you think they are rejecting you.”
Source: https://twitter.com/arjunmahadevan/status/1677775875369058304
Source: Disclaimer (2013) http://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/about/disclaimer-2/
“Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.”
Part 4: Rebellion and Art
The Rebel (1951)
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Context: The atheist who affects to reason, and the fanatic who rejects reason, plunge themselves alike into inextricable difficulties. The one perverts the sublime and enlightening study of natural philosophy into a deformity of absurdities by not reasoning to the end. The other loses himself in the obscurity of metaphysical theories, and dishonours the Creator, by treating the study of his works with contempt. The one is a half-rational of whom there is some hope, the other a visionary to whom we must be charitable.
From a speech given by Rosalyn Yalow to a group of school children approximately five years after being awarded the Nobel Prize, as quoted by the New York Times, June 2, 2011 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/us/02yalow.html.
David Frost (January 1980), The Shah Speaks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKUQUDf5IBo&feature=related (video)
Interviews
Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
On censorship, interview https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130801124618/http://absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/lois_duncan.htm in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002
“Rejection is nature's way of telling you to write a better book.”
Making Light: "How To Get Published" http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012744.html (6 December 2010), nielsenhayden.com