Writing as an Art Quotes

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.

I knew I loved writing, and I was raised by people who love books.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

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.

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

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

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.

My mom never went to college, so she just assumed the writer identity, and that was always really inspiring to me. It's not something you need nine levels of education for. It's really an identity that you claim for yourself, and then you have to make yourself one.

To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.

I may not have become a good writer, but I managed to make a living out of writing.

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

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

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

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

I don't think it matters how fast you write. It's how long you thought about it. I like to think of it as a well filling up. I think about it until the well is full, and then I let go.

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.

No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.

Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson have both been writing for a long time. In 30 years, will writers of that quality have been able to serve the same sort of apprenticeship? Not unless they can make enough money now to live on.

I love writing, and I am one of the people who can do it and make a living.

I don't know if I had ever found my place in the world until I fully committed to being a writer.

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.

The writing is just a boring job. It's just a horrible job.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.