Quotes About Professional Writing

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

David Foster Wallace

#2. A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

Craig Newmark

#3. I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it's not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work.

Fran Lebowitz

#4. The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Robert Benchley

#5. Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.

Pankaj Mishra

#6. Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

John Dos Passos

#7. I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.

Shelley Berman

#8. There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.

Agatha Christie

#9. When you're an artist, your personal life and your professional life kind of blend together. I'm writing from home so I don't have an office or anything. I don't know where to draw the line between "Okay, let's stop now and watch American Idol."

Daryl Wein

#10. [On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)

David Halberstam

#11. The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.

Steven Pressfield

#12. I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.

Red Smith

#13. I realized I was officially a professional writer when all my plans began with "drink coffee" and ended with "take a nap.

Cassandra Duffy

#14. Being a professional writer is a lot like being a hooker. You'd better find out if you're any good at it before you start charging for it.

Sharyn McCrumb

#15. We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.

John Green

#16. The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

Steven Pressfield

#17. Unlike a typical professional, I can't quit my job to become a full-time author; I don't have that luxury. For me, writing is therapy; if I choose to write full-time, it might start feeling like work.

Ashwin Sanghi

#18. I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

Jess Walter

#19. The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can't help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years.

Helen DeWitt

#20. Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.

Shannon Hale

#21. I've been a professional athlete, I've directed films, I've run a company with 150 employees, and nothing compares to writing a screenplay. Just the second I think I know what I'm doing, the rug gets pulled out and I have no idea what I'm doing. Because there are so many problems to solve.

Stacy Peralta

#22. Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.

W. Somerset Maugham

#23. Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#24. Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

Sara Sheridan

#25. My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

Gerry Abbey

#26. When I'm not working in a professional capacity, I'm writing, and when I'm at home, it's a way of having contact with people or communicating.

Jessie Cave

#27. Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less than your best.

Robert C. Martin

#28. I spent 10 years in professional politics and eight writing comics, and so I look at it from both sides. I don't understand the logic in being frustrated with a system, so you choose to be a part of the reason why the system is so frustrating. If everybody voted, it wouldn't be this way.

Andrew Aydin

#29. My brother says that I was writing songs about fate while he was off playing soccer. Now I tell him he's 33 and being a professional while I'm playing soccer with my friends. Ha!

Alanis Morissette

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

Richard Bach

#31. Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

Peter Selgin

#32. I have learned how I work best, and that is something that, if you're going to be a professional writer, you should be noticing: under what circumstances you work at your best, and to not get yourself cornered into writing in a way that doesn't let you do your best.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#33. Among the seventy-three teachers who responded, scores ranged from 50 to 96! Just as Starch and Elliott found a century earlier, scores varied by more than forty-five percentage points - and that's among teachers who received specific professional development in writing assessment!

Thomas Guskey

#34. I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

Tana French

#35. Everybody can write a beginning and an ending, but to actually define that middle point where everything will go from professional to person, where everything will change, is always the hardest part, because it can very easily be too constructed, too artificial.

Tobias Lindholm

#36. The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Leo Rosten

#37. story telling is not a career, it's a calling. I've been writing true and compelling news my entire professional life. My novels are packs of lies

Glen Carter

#38. Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#39. Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine ... ) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

Bertrand Meyer

#40. I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

Dan Chaon

#41. It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

Ayumi Hamasaki

#42. Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

Sara Sheridan

#43. I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.

Laura Anne Gilman

#44. Amateurs ... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.

Norman Mailer

#45. You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio.

Kara DioGuardi

#46. Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.

Karen Thompson Walker

#47. Professional writers don't have muses; they have mortgages.

Larry Kahaner

#48. ..i'd like to take my professional life, my career, my writing, my family and my friends seriously, but please, please protect me from ever taking myself too seriously.... Seumas

Seumas Gallacher

#49. To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

Langston Hughes

#50. The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

Steven Pressfield

#51. I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

Sue Townsend

#52. I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

Rebecca Wells

#53. Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.

P.C. Cast

#54. Every separate sector of artistic creation has its own basic rules ... data which govern it. They are contained in the textbooks on these subjects. A professional knows the rules of the game as a matter of course so that he can achieve, in the upper strata above that, a high quality of art.

L. Ron Hubbard

#55. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

Octavia Butler

#56. What would happen if you allowed a bug to slip through a module, and it cost
your company $10,000? The nonprofessional would shrug his shoulders, say
"stuff happens," and start writing the next module. The professional would
write the company a check for $10,000!

Robert C. Martin

#57. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

Morris West

#58. Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Raymond Chandler

#59. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Beth Revis

#60. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

Jane Yolen

#61. It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.

Flannery O'Connor

#62. A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Jamaica Kincaid

#63. Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

Hugh Mackay

#64. There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance.

Lauren Willig

#65. There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon.

Stephen Jay Gould

#66. Scribbler, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own.

Ambrose Bierce

#67. I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.

Cleveland Amory

#68. I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

Joe Haldeman

#69. A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.

Philip Pullman

#70. I do feel haunted by some of the letters and the suffering people have endured. But I keep in mind that the people who write to me know that I am a journalist and an on-line advice columnist, not a social service professional.

Emily Yoffe

#71. I had been a writer all of my life, every waking second, and now that part of my life was over. I suppose the truth was that I had never put myself forward as a writer, I didn't like the idea of the 'professional writer'; I just wanted to write. But that was not how the world worked...

Bonnie Greer

#72. When I submitted samples, I had only written stories to give myself something to draw. I was told, "The art is good, but not quite professional yet. But, I like the writing." I've been a writer for almost a half a century. It's very cool.

Len Wein

#73. At this stage, my chief professional goal is simply to keep on writing and making a living at it.

Fred Saberhagen

#74. Tengo did not know for certain whether he wanted to be a professional novelist, nor was he sure he had the talent to write fiction. What he did know was that he could not help spending a large part of every day writing fiction. To him, writing was like breathing.

Haruki Murakami

#75. It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)

Christopher Hitchens

#76. I'm a professional songwriter - personal attitudes have nothing to do with writing a song.

Sammy Cahn

#77. We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

Walter Kirn