Jenny Zhang Quotes

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I'm writing.

Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.

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

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

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

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.

I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

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've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.

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 was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

I took a lot of writing courses.

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

I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it. I can't believe it when writers tell me 'I don't want to show my work to anybody'.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

I write about what I know.