Nelson DeMille Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is a privilege, what we get to do. To be able to tell stories. It's a luxury. So I have a business-like approach to it, the same way I had with football.

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

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.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

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.

As much as writing is an emotional experience, it is a business as well. Coming from a business background, I treat it as such.

I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.

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

The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.

Writing was my first occupation, begun at age 23.

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

I'm always writing or playing because that is my life.

I live for the text. It's my job.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

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