Alexander Chee Quotes

When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.

At this stage, my chief professional goal is simply to keep on writing and making a living at it.

My aunt could never understand how writing could be a full-time job. She'd keep asking when I'd get a real job!

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

The idea that you could make a living from writing always thrilled me.

I live for the text. It's my job.

I'd always been a big reader, and I loved books, and I always thought writing would be a great way to get by in the world.

Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

Who will want to write if writing doesn't pay?

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

For me, writing is fun. The day I quit my job and take up writing full time, writing will become just another job. A commercial necessity.

I've had a few jobs, but if you want to be a writer, you're better off getting a job that doesn't require that you do anything.

You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it's a business.

I knew I wanted to write professionally and get paid.

More of my songs are intended to be funny than almost anyone else. Sometimes maybe it cheers me up a bit. I've got a distance from it. Sometimes what I'm writing is more important to me than the rest of my life. It's more important to me that I'm writing well than anything else.

When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.

I actually was doing ghostwriting jobs since I was 17 years old, so I've been supporting myself off and on with writing jobs for almost 10 years. But those were all things that I did off the books. And now I do a lot more writing on the books.

Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.

A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.