Literary Profession Quotes

From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I'm self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, 'What do you think?' I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?

[Writers are] the highest paid secretaries in the world.

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

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

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

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.'

So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.

The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.

I don't really think of writing as a career. It's something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Never pursue literature as a trade.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

Is there not some place within your gift where I can earn a decent support for myself, my wife, and child? I have not heard of a single author, not even a small one like myself, who has been placed under obligation to the Republican party. And yet I think the Republican party is under some obligation to us authors.

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy; he will be silent on his more personal interests, or, if he must speak, will veil them under conventional forms.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.