Leonard Cohen Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else.

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

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

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

I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.

My aunt could never understand how writing could be a full-time job. She'd keep asking when I'd get a real job!

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

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

I've had a few jobs, but if you want to be a writer, you're better off getting a job that doesn't require that you do anything.

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

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.

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.

When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.

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

I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.

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.

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

I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.