Ryan Holiday Quotes

I actually was doing ghostwriting jobs since I was 17 years old, so I've been supporting myself off and on with writing jobs for almost 10 years. But those were all things that I did off the books. And now I do a lot more writing on the books.

I spent 20 years of my career primarily being a writer for hire.

Well, I'm a writer by nature, and I got a little bit - a little taste of a daily fast-paced writing job, writing career, and I loved it.

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.

It's fun being paid to read stuff and air your opinion about it - pretty much a dream job for a writer.

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.

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.

So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them.

I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.

It's a job. I entertain my readers. I get up in the morning, and I start typing.

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work, and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you, anyway.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

I realized you might make money at writing, and you might even make a living at it. So after that I didn't write stories just for the class but wrote them for the purpose of submitting them somewhere, and at some point in the process, I began writing them just to please myself and that's where you begin to see the real value of a life of writing.

I used to joke about this but I've recently realized that I really believe it: I spent many years training myself to write very slowly for pretty good money. So the idea of writing really quickly for free offends me.

Anybody who can write home for money can write for magazines.

But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it. I went to business school because in the '80, it was the thing to do. I thought that marketing was a way to be creative in business, but quickly learned all creative stuff happens at the ad agency.

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.