Robert Greene Quotes

I worked for many years as a writer for children and then wrote two adult novels of the kind they call 'literary' without any very great disturbance to this kind of life. Then, something went wrong. My third adult novel was rejected by the publisher of the first two. And I could not understand the criticism offered.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people out there toiling over your unpublished manuscript, trying to make your way across that vast ocean in a bathtub, I can only say this to you: keep paddling. Well, either that or start vlogging.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

I don't think I'll be making documentaries my whole life.

It wasn't until after college that I started writing. I had just applied randomly for jobs in the media and got one on a magazine called 'Pensions World.' So I was writing for a living there and that's when I started my first book.

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

When the 'Fight Club' movie was going into production, I quit my job so I could write full-time.

There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.

When I met Penn, he was an actor, but he wasn't working, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to go back to work, and I was kind of into that!

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.

A cool thing about enthusiast press is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can decide they want to set out on this path and start publishing immediately.

Really, my biggest risk was just the initial step to quit my day job to do music. I was packaging and shipping for an art gallery in Manhattan; I went to school for painting, so I always wanted to work around artwork, even though I wasn't really contributing anything to the scene.

If you don't like what you're doing, get out.

I moved to California in 2011 to be a writer. A family friend told me to take acting classes so I could do commercials and actually make a little money.

My family realized I was going to do birth work and then music; they were like, 'What's a doula? This is not what you were meant to do!' And I was like, 'Everyone thinks they can only do one thing.'

I knew if I were ever to leave 'Godspell,' which I loved so much, it would have to be for something really spectacular.

When I was at school I wanted to be a writer and an actress. Then this whole modelling thing happened.

I had wanted to be an actress when I was little, but I wasn't very good at it, so I tried a lot of different things.

I never wanted to be an actor, and then 'GH' was the first time where my managers were like, 'Quit your day job. You got a thing.'

If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

I just typed up three, four paragraphs of an idea and dropped it in a box at the Chicago Comic Con in the summer of 2000, I guess, or 2001 - I forget. I just dropped it on a stack of a giant pile of dozens of other entries. Months later, I was thrilled to get a call from a Marvel editor while I was working my crappy day-job.

My father was a television director and producer, working on documentaries and current affairs programmes including 'Panorama,' and I didn't think he'd find acting a sensible option. But as soon as I'd finished my A-levels, I got on a train to Edinburgh, and that was it.