George Orwell Quotes

One tends to overlook the fact that all during the 30's and actually during the late 40's I was a highly successful writer and a great many properties accumulated during that period of time.

I will write a couple of books and become a millionaire.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

The reason I'm here today, the reason I own a brand new Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the reason I have a big log cabin and I got cars and all kinds of stuff is because I'm a writer and writers own everything. So you learn how to write.

The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book

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.

You're always hoping you can attract a bigger audience, but at the same time, I'd hate to give up what I write. If I could write Chick Lit or something like that and make money off it, that'd be great. But I just can't do it.

If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.

I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

I thought to myself, 'why not write a bestseller?' In the first place, more people buy them and more people read them. You make more money and it doesn’t take any more time to write a bestseller than it does to write a book nobody buys.

I don't know what my friends do. Generally they become producers. That way they can stop writing!

The Lampoon started in 1970, and I began writing freelance for them around the end of 1971, and then all through '72. They hired me in '73, and I left early in '81. I did everything from low puns to being editor-in-chief.

. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.

What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.

there are only two ways to make a lot [of money] while you're young: One is to entertain the public; and the other is to cheat it.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.

Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.

Make lots of money. Enjoy the work. Operate within the law. Choose any two of three

I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.

You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

I might have become a minor celebrity but royalty checks were a long way off.