“Bestseller doesn’t necessarily mean good writer. I think it takes 10,000 book sales to make the bestseller’s list, and at about 9 dollars a pop for my book, if I had an extra $90,000 dollars of disposable income, I’d be a bestseller tomorrow. But would I be a better writer? No, I’d be a poorer writer—about $75,000 dollars poorer.”
“A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.”
“I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, "Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that?" The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars”
“I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them. ”
“I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn’t take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys.”
“Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.”