Life & Wisdom Quote by Anita Diament

“I got nice rejections” is a neat little oxymoron: the velvet glove on a closed door. Diament isn’t dramatizing cruelty; she’s pointing to a publishing culture that prides itself on politeness while enforcing a hard commercial logic. “Explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell” reads like an industry script, the kind of reasonable-sounding note that disguises risk aversion as market wisdom. It’s not personal, the letters imply. It’s just math.

The subtext is sharper: gatekeeping often arrives as empathy. A “nice” rejection can be more demoralizing than a blunt one because it offers the illusion of dialogue while keeping power static. The explanation also shifts responsibility away from taste, bias, or imagination (“We don’t see it”) and onto a supposedly neutral marketplace (“Readers won’t”). That move launders an aesthetic decision into an economic inevitability.

Then comes the hinge: “But I kept trying.” No mythic talk of destiny, no tortured-genius posturing, just persistence as strategy. Diament frames resilience not as inspirational poster material but as a working writer’s response to a system built to say no. In context, it’s also a quiet defense of historical fiction itself: the genre’s “difficult sell” label ignores how often it becomes a bestseller once someone takes the initial leap. Her line captures that paradox publishers rarely admit: they want proof of demand before they’ll risk creating it.