Robert E. Howard Quotes

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 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.'

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

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

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.

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

I may not have become a good writer, but I managed to make a living out of writing.

The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

I've been a writer for 42 years and, yes, it is a full time job for me. Not a hobby, but serious work.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

I tell young people who ask me about a future in writing not to go into it unless they get married to someone rich.

Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

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.

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.

I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.

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

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.

I knew I wanted to write professionally and get paid.

I had a million jobs before I managed to make a living out of poetry.