David Brin Quotes

I'm probably one of the few authors in this country who could very comfortably live off my writing.

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 love writing, and I am one of the people who can do it and make a living.

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

Once 'Walk Two Moons' received the Newbery Medal, I decided to write full-time. Partly because there seemed to be an audience out there who wanted to read what I wanted to write, and partly because I could now support myself financially through writing.

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.'

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

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

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

Sweden is a small country, and a Swedish writer can barely make a living as an author. We were able to quit our jobs as journalists only after we had been translated into, among others, German.

If I could wave a magic wand and be anything, I'd be a really respected, really successful author. That's a hard combination to get, though. I really enjoy acting, and it's easier, frankly.

I really think it is possible to make a very nice living by writing and not worrying about anything else.

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

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

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

Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

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 started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

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.

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.

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.