Home > Work > How I Became a Famous Novelist
1 " Writing a novel— actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs— is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit. "
― Steve Hely , How I Became a Famous Novelist
2 " I try not to hate anybody. "Hate is a four-letter word," like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers.Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people's work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out "reviews." Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty.Even when being "kindly," book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. "We look forward to hearing more from the author," a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.But a bad book review is just disgusting.Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of "telling people how bad different books are"? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life? "
3 " Australians: Men who forked snakes in the sun-baked desert, and popped the eyes out of dingoes with old ANZAC rifles, and surfed between gaping shark mouths, all while downing 20oz. cans of Victoria Bitter. Men trained by gap years padding about Thailand and India in a drunken stupor, flipping off the local constabulary. These men, friends of the groom, would dare each other to feats of athletic drinking. One of them, called Bonko or Rhino, would collapse off his chair half conscious as his comrades hooted with raucous delight. "
4 " […] I’ve cut a lot of the boring stuff out. It wasn’t like writing essays, where I could bang one out and go to See’s. This was three hundred pages. It’s not that it was hard, exactly. It was more like shoveling snow or cleaning out the attic, tedious labor toward a very distant end. "
5 " To do the best of things in the worst of times, and to hope in the most calamitous. That’s why I write. "
