Chinua Achebe Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else.

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

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.

At this stage, my chief professional goal is simply to keep on writing and making a living at 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.

I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.

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

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

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

My aunt could never understand how writing could be a full-time job. She'd keep asking when I'd get a real job!

I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.

When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.