Will Eisner Quotes

Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

I don't write for the money. I write because something in me is constantly compelled.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.

Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.

I don't write songs, play music and tour, really, for anyone else but myself. It's something that I have to do to stay alive.

I keep writing because it is deeply pleasurable to me.

Writing doesn't leave much time for hobbies, unless you consider that I began writing as a hobby and have made the hobby into a profession.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

On a more practical level, anyone out there who wants to be a writer should clearly recognize that this is a brutal business, where even incredibly talented people sometimes never make a living. If you want to chase such a dream, please have a Plan B in place.

It's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

Writing is a calling, not a choice.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

I never want kids to walk away after a school presentation and say, 'I met a writer today.' I want them to say, 'I am a writer.'