The Accidental Bestseller Quotes

“She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn’t leave a hangover.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. —E. L. DOCTOROW”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“the Beaux Arts building’s grand Corinthian columns and its three immense archways. Two majestic marble lions served as bookends. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had named them Patience and Fortitude during the depths of the Great Depression in an effort to inspire his beleaguered New Yorkers, and Lacy had adopted them as her personal mascots. She looked to them now for the answers she sought, but Patience and Fortitude weren’t talking.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. —LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“She read every author she could get her hands on who wrote a strong female protagonist who triumphed in the end.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Somehow she’d clabbered together a series of student loans to get her undergraduate degree at Boston College. Her graduation gift to herself was a new name and a new city.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“We’re professional liars, aren’t we? It’s our job to keep the story interesting.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you. —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“whenever I do a signing or a talk, people are really curious about the business and the whole creative process.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“But what I wanted to capture was the connection we felt, feel, for each other. And how it enhances our work and, well, um, our lives.” Saying it out loud it sounded as if she’d been too lazy to imagine something and so had decided to rip off their lives. “Originally I thought one of the writers would have a real problem and the others would come to her aid.” Kendall looked around the table and smiled sheepishly. “I had no idea I’d be the one needing help so desperately. I’d pictured a car crash or an illness that kept the protagonist from being able to write, not an evil editor and a disappearing husband.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Mallory sat propped up in bed, her laptop, appropriately enough, in her lap,”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“the fact that her children were so obviously living their own lives was bittersweet. Their independence was what you hoped for and worked toward, but the reality was you just weren’t that critical anymore.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“She’d heard once that shaping your lips into a smile whether you meant it or not made your words sound happier.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“being able to work in a robe and slippers was one of the greatest perks of being a writer.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Men and women of God are full of strength and wisdom; they are full of can-do power. There is nothing in your future, your life, that you cannot accomplish.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“She wrote for years, one book after another, just trying to get somewhere. At one point, despite all the roadblocks her publisher put in her way, she hit the New York Times list and got a multimillion dollar contract with another publisher.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“satellite TV—as always amazed that there could be so many options and so little to watch.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Like Pig-Pen from the Charlie Brown comic strip, her cloud hovered over her, dark and daunting and devoid of a silver lining.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Give a man an inch and he’ll call himself a ruler,”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story. —JOHN LE CARRÉ”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“When you can sit down and produce a four-hundred-page manuscript that can transport a reader somewhere else for a spell, maybe I’ll allow you to criticize.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“They prided themselves on being honest with each other, but they were women. Sometimes they put protecting feelings above the truth. Or looking self-sufficient above asking for help.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“began to pray in earnest. She realized as she did so that she hadn’t addressed God in any way since her father’s fatal illness five years ago. And if God hadn’t responded to that life-and-death situation, what were the chances that He was going to bother with a matter as small as Kendall Aims’s career?”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“Do you think there’s really a job where all you do is count the number of threads in a sheet? It sounds a whole lot easier than the Laundromat and the diner.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. . . . If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him. —EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“The rest of their authors were thrown out there, much like shit flung at a wall, while the publisher waited to see who “stuck,” or so it seemed to Kendall.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“You and I are bona fide evidence that a writer’s dreams can come true.” “Maybe we should warn them that sometimes those dreams turn into nightmares,”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller

“At forty-five not even expensive highlights and a boatload of Lycra could disguise the fact that her body had given up its struggle against gravity.”
― Wendy Wax, The Accidental Bestseller