Robert E. Howard Quotes

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!

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.

I knew I wanted to write professionally and get paid.

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

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.

Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.

I was always told you're not going to make much money from writing. You can actually do it. Now I've built a really good, big house out of words.

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

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

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

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 always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things.

I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

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

I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.

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.

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.'

Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream.

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

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.

I didn't really realize that writing... would be fun and people would pay you to do it. Being an astronaut is a glory profession, and so is writing, in a way.