James A. Michener Quotes

I wish it grew on trees, but it takes hard work to make money.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

I think that when you decide to dedicate yourself to creative endeavors and surround yourself with people who are creative, you very quickly learn how hard it is to survive doing those kinds of things, not to mention make a living at them.

It became apparent to me really fast that I wasn't going to be able to make a living and pay my bills playing on Broadway.

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

Most actors can't make any kind of living.

I love doing independent films, but it's very hard to make a living that way.

Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

Most actors are not rich - they are very poor indeed. What keeps them going is that they just love the job.

Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.

I'm an entrepreneur, a businessman. I've got a lot of money, and that doesn't go very well with the whole 'starving artist in a garret' routine.

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment.

When someone succeeded in quickly making a lot of money in America, people said he had made his fortune.

Many good qualities are not sufficient to balance a single want - the want of money.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

I think the problem is that we Nigerians have yet to accept that we are now poorer than we used to be.

In a capitalistic society, success is determined by whether you can pay the bills.

I like to work. I mean, part of it for me is that I was a struggling actor, could barely pay my rent, until I was almost 40.

I was doing a lot of great theatre, but I just couldn't work out how to make ends meet.

To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.