Ken Spillman Quotes

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

I knew I wanted to write professionally and get paid.

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

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

Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.

I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.

I've had a few jobs, but if you want to be a writer, you're better off getting a job that doesn't require that you do anything.

But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a 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 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.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

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.

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

I didn't really realize that writing... would be fun and people would pay you to do it. Being an astronaut is a glory profession, and so is writing, in a way.

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

The idea that you could make a living from writing always thrilled me.

To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.

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

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

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.