Writing Career Quotes

#1. All you need is coffee, some cigarettes, and a Twitter account and your writing career begins! How far you go is determined by the followers you call friends.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#2. I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

James A. Michener

#3. With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.

Amish Tripathi

#4. At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

Bernard Cornwell

#5. I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.

Matt Ridley

#6. I debated whether to tell them I had long since abandoned my writing career and moved into radishes and fraud, but decided the timing was wrong.

Susan Juby

#7. I don't know what'll ever happen if I'm in a healthy relationship. My writing career will go down the tubes.

Jason Fuchs

#8. I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.

Marsha Norman

#9. It's the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself.

Amy Hempel

#10. I've always felt profoundly about what's going on in the world on a daily basis. What I hadn't felt was that I was at a point in my writing career where I could write about these things in songs and do it well.

PJ Harvey

#11. I don't use my writing career as a vehicle to get me acting work or to write roles for myself.

Danny Strong

#12. I have always been drawn to characters, and this was true for my feature-writing career as well, where there is a tension between rule-breaking and rule-following.

Matt Nix

#13. The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book

Holly Lisle

#14. I've had lots of people saying very nice things about the work. But I genuinely feel in the course of a writing career you're going to have people say very nice things and some not-so-nice things, and if at all possible you should try to ignore both.

Kevin Barry

#15. I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.

Mary Balogh

#16. I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

James Ellroy

#17. But, Erin. If you are trying to make a writing career for yourself, you will get rejected again and again and again. You must keep going. You must learn not to take no for an answer.

Jennifer Echols

#18. I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot ... and memory is important.

Judy Collins

#19. When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.

Ann Hood

#20. I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

Douglas Coupland

#21. The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#22. I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.

Maria Semple

#23. My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.

James Ellroy

#24. In the business world, I did fairly well, but wasn't happy. A bout of sciatica put me flat on my back. All I could do was read, listen to my mother's stories about the Sandovals, and daydream: a return to self. My writing career had begun.

Sandra Cisneros

#25. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
[Writer's Digest, September 1961]

Harper Lee

#26. It certainly made a film writing career for me.

Buck Henry

#27. Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

Joseph Brodsky

#28. Through Twitter, I've got a writing career and a directing career, as well as hundreds of other beneficial things that have happened to me. I love it.

Peter Serafinowicz

#29. I learned early in my writing career that if I try to tailor a song for someone else, I'm usually off base. They're usually looking for something from you with your character.

Brenda Russell

#30. I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#31. All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.

Janette Turner Hospital

#32. To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the deadline come first before anything else. Writing is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. You need self-confidence and an iron carapace.

Virginia Henley

#33. I wasn't always a novelist. I began my writing career as a journalist, working on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney, Australia, doing the crime beat and court reporting. Having grown up in a small country town, I felt as though I had nothing to write about.

Michael Robotham

#34. 'The Atlantic' really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

Nic Pizzolatto

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

Pankaj Mishra

#36. When my writing career took off, it was pretty easy to keep my ego in check because old-school martial arts isn't about ego gratification. It's about maintaining a balanced view of the world and your place in it.

Jonathan Maberry

#37. I like my writing career and it's progression, I'd rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that yields no heat.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#38. If we are invested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product.

Julia Cameron

#39. Well, I'm a writer by nature, and I got a little bit - a little taste of a daily fast-paced writing job, writing career, and I loved it.

Victoria Gotti

#40. Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.

Kelli Jae Baeli

#41. I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

Rick Riordan

#42. Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.

Jim Crace

#43. I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

Sue Grafton

#44. If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product - for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.

Julia Cameron

#45. It took a while to find a passion for another career that was as strong as the passion that I had for football. Once I found it in acting, it was simple. Use the tools you were given from playing football and apply it to your new passion. I have done that through acting, producing and writing.

Maurice Hall

#46. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize

Arthur Hertzberg

#47. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Cheryl Strayed

#48. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.

Rhianna Pratchett

#49. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"?

Steven Kotler

#50. My father told me when I first started that standup is exciting and I should pursue it, but that writing would be the thing that would give me power over my career. I never have to take a road gig or a writing gig I don't want because I always have the ability to play one against the other.

Greg Fitzsimmons

#51. I'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career.

Nora Roberts

#52. I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.

Stephan Pastis

#53. The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

John Banville

#54. The MIT professor Sherry Turkle, who has devoted her career to studying and writing about the impact of digital technology on our lives, once wrote that sociable technology always disappoints, because it promises what it cannot deliver. "It promises friendship but can only deliver performance,

David Sax

#55. I'd always thought that if I could get sober and stay sober, I would be able to have a career making music. My drug and alcohol addiction was the one thing holding me back. I had finally gotten the tools to stay sober, and it was just a matter of writing the songs.

Macklemore

#56. 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.

Jamaica Kincaid

#57. Let's face it - online promotion of your books could easily become a full-time career if you're not careful. But if you're not writing regularly, then it won't be long before there's nothing to promote.

Teresa Medeiros

#58. Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

Lou Reed

#59. I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity.

David Wroblewski

#60. It's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.

Erin Morgenstern

#61. ..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

#62. When I think about my career and how it all started, it really started with me getting to a point where I understood how to write songs that resonated with people.

Corey Smith

#63. When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

Nick Flynn

#64. I've made a career writing about fictitious anti-heroes. To create these worlds, I've spent a lot of time with active members on both sides of the law. And if I had to pick the most interesting of the two, the choice is obvious - we all love the guys in black.

Kurt Sutter

#65. I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

Al Yankovic

#66. The core of my career is my teaching and my writing.

Elizabeth Warren

#67. I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#68. Riffing on language will create wonderful effects you never intended. Which leads me to this writing advice: 'Always take credit for good stuff you didn't intend, because you'll be getting plenty of criticism in your career for bad stuff you didn't mean either.'

Roy Peter Clark

#69. Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I have to have fine line between teaching and writing. I try not to ever think of career. I just try to go to the dream world every day.

Andre Dubus

#70. No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

Julia Cameron

#71. I really (became) very independent. I was start(ed) to write one-woman shows and mak(e) films and to me I think I really felt like my choice (was) more important than any kind of career goal.

Margaret Cho

#72. I think the essence of the argument has always been, first of all, the Guild doesn't want writing on spec. And that's been a major problem over the years. But obviously, to the young writer that's unfair and it's discriminatory, and it can be very hurtful to one's career.

Rod Serling

#73. My acting career wasn't going where I wanted it to. I wasn't getting good parts. I got so bored with myself that I started writing.

Susan Strasberg

#74. Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

Justin Cronin

#75. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]

Ray Bradbury

#76. In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long" novel.

Scott Bradfield

#77. When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

Michael Lewis

#78. I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

Carl Sandburg

#79. I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.

Steve Capus

#80. I love writing for and about women. In my whole career I have.

Mitch Glazer

#81. If you're chained to a computer all day, you're not using up much energy, even if you drag yourself to the gym a couple of days a week. And to make matters worse for me, I've had a secondary career right along with my romance writing - cookbook author, under my real name, Ruth Glick.

Ruth Glick

#82. I didn't aspire to write and never considered it as a career option.

Vantile Whitfield

#83. In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.

Tea Obreht

#84. A lot of people can figure out the social media aspect of it, or the merchandising aspect, or whatever and get enough momentum to start a career. To sustain it, you have to keep writing and you have to keep creating.

Tyler Hilton

#85. Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?

Darin Strauss

#86. As a youngster, I never dreamed there could be a career actually earning a living writing music.

John Williams

#87. I want to be remembered as an actor who put in some good work in the beginning of his career, even better work at the end of his career and slowly, successfully made the transition into writing and directing.

Jonathan Brandis

#88. You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

Hilary Mantel

#89. Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

Tana French

#90. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body.

Annie Dillard

#91. Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

Maureen Corrigan

#92. What you keep alive is what you truly care about, no matter how many times you die in the process.

Shannon L. Alder

#93. Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since.

Warren Adler

#94. I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

Orson Scott Card

#95. All authors go to heaven; we have paid our dues on earth by choosing to the hellish career of writing

Carl Henegan

#96. When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

Tom Glazer

#97. The satisfaction I feel from finishing another story is tantamount to, say, crossing the finish line for the career marathoner.

Susan Wingate

#98. I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.

Jon Krakauer

#99. Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age-too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.

John F. Kennedy

#100. I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

Loudon Wainwright III