Commercial Writing Quotes

I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.

When I'm writing for other people, I have to play it safe.

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.

I'm a writer, but this is a business. You have to look at it in the way you would look at any business.

I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.

Well, I hate it when authors come into a school and they say to kids, 'Write from your heart, only write what you know, and write from your heart.' I hate that because it's useless. I've written over 300 books - not one was written from my heart. Not one. They were all written for an audience, they were all written to entertain a certain audience.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

There's still a place for someone to come up with a strong headline, some copy in a commercial that's well written. I'm not saying it was better in the old days; it's just a totally different way of communicating.

There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.

If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

Nobody can write a good 30-second commercial.

The only people who can be excused for letting a bad book loose on the world are the poor devils who have to write for a living.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.

I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

I made commercials for corporations like Volkswagen and Coca-Cola, but I was always the one to write them, too, which was a very good exercise, because I learned to tell little stories.

I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

Nay, Sir, those who write in them, write well, in order to be paid well.

There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.