Writing for a Living Quotes

I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.

I'm not much of a correspondent. My letters are not only uninteresting but sparse. I'm glad I don?t have to write for a living. It?s arduous work and the money is very uncertain. On those rare occasions when I wander into a bookstore it amazes me to see the avalanche of literature and semi-literature that is turned out weekly in this country. The people who write these things are either desperate for money or love starved. Why should anyone on a nice balmy day lock oneself in an office and hit a typewriter for hours on end. I think one of the greatest pleasures in the world is not writing.

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.

I did a lot of weird jobs, like most writers do.

When I was in college or working, I had the luxury of writing on whatever subject. Now, I'm in the business, I have a deadline and pressures. Sometimes, I have to do things that I am not in the mood for.

I've always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and stay there and put words together.

Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.

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

I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.

Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.

Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.

I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose - and people who aren't related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary.

The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

I enjoy writing but I wouldn't want to do it all the time because generally you are not writing about things you want to write about.

I actually was doing ghostwriting jobs since I was 17 years old, so I've been supporting myself off and on with writing jobs for almost 10 years. But those were all things that I did off the books. And now I do a lot more writing on the books.

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.