David Leavitt Quotes

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

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.

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

I write the books to amuse myself.

If it pleases you and you can write at all, it's gonna please somebody else.

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.

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.

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.

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

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I've never been a model, I was an actress for like a minute, but I've always been a writer. That's where I'm going to stay.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it. I can't believe it when writers tell me 'I don't want to show my work to anybody'.

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.

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.