Writing Business Quotes

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

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

Margot [Hentoff] used to write regularly for The Voice, for The New York Review of Books, for Harper's Bazaar, and she really had the most distinctive writing style, even more than mine, than I've ever seen in this business.

I journal for about half an hour, and by the time that's done, the business day on the East Coast has begun. The phone starts to ring, and the rest of the day is spent dealing with the business of writing. My workday is done at about 3:00.

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.

My favourite authors are Jeffrey Archer, for his story telling skills; John Grisham, for the completely new genre he created; and James Patterson, for the way he created a new business model out of writing.

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state. [Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.

Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

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

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

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.

You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it's a business.