Rebecca Makkai Quotes

I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.

I was writing a lot even as a kid.

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'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career.

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

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

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

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 don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'

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

I'm not someone who from a young age imagined myself being a writer or had dreams of being a novelist or anything like that, but I was always very driven by ideas and by values, and that is the reason I got into journalism.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

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

I've known since I was 12 that I wanted to write. My father was a teacher, and there were so many books around, it seemed natural to pick them up.

Since the moment I could hold a pencil, I have spent nearly all day every day writing. And there is not an age group that I have not written for. You can read me from birth 'til death.

Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.

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

We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.

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.

My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.

I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'

It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.