James L. Brooks Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.

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

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'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.

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

No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.

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.

As much as writing is an emotional experience, it is a business as well. Coming from a business background, I treat it as such.

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

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.

Writing doesn't leave much time for hobbies, unless you consider that I began writing as a hobby and have made the hobby into a profession.

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.'

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.

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.

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

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

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

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it. I went to business school because in the '80, it was the thing to do. I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business, but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency.