Elizabeth Strout Quotes

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

When I got to college, acting suddenly seemed like a very risky proposition and all my friends were going to law school or med school or Wall Street.

I didn't feel like I was meant to be a nurse or a secretary.

I think I didn't know whether I wanted to keep acting deep into my career. I kept trying to see if I would be able to do it well enough to make that part of my destiny or part of what I was supposed to do.

I'm not ready to decide if modeling is what I want to do with my life.

I was never really sure what I wanted to do - I'm in awe of these people who knew at age 10 or 12 they wanted to be a brain surgeon, and they did it, and they still are.

I wouldn't know any other way to live except to be an artist. I'm not very good at anything else.

I was always meant to be a writer. I've felt that way since I was a child.

Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted.

I figured out early on what I wanted to do.

I wasn't meant to be an attorney, but I was meant to go to law school.

Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.

I never had an existential moment when I asked myself what I was going to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer, and I knew exactly the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

One doesn't choose to become a writer. One is just born that way.

I think there's only one reason to write in any genre or to any particular age group: You are called to it. You think it'd be fun.

I used to think that I wanted to be a hat maker, but I don't think that would have worked out.

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 had no idea when I graduated from high school and then from graduate school what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea that I was ever going to be an actor.

I remember feeling a little guilty every time I opened a Chipotle. I felt guilty because I wasn't following my true passion. But that eventually went away. And I realized that this is my calling.

I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.

I already knew that this is what I'm gonna do during my life because martial arts, for me, it's not just my job. It's not just the way to get some money. Of course it's important.

Since I was a child, everyone would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Was I going to be a designer? It's as if there was a path drawn for me, and I could see, from where I was standing, exactly where it ended.

Some teachers used to worry and ask me, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?'

I was having a dilemma whether I wanted to return to acting at all because I was coming from this sort of agency-less childhood career, and I'd never made the choice to go into acting.