Harlan Coben Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

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.

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.

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

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

When I went in, my editor said, 'I hope you don't think you're a writer.' And I said, 'I hope you don't think I'm a journalist.' And, uh, turned out we were both right.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

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.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson have both been writing for a long time. In 30 years, will writers of that quality have been able to serve the same sort of apprenticeship? Not unless they can make enough money now to live on.

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

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.

I love writing. It makes me so happy.

I don't know if I had ever found my place in the world until I fully committed to being a writer.

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.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.