The idea that you could make a living from writing always thrilled me.
My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
My aunt could never understand how writing could be a full-time job. She'd keep asking when I'd get a real job!
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
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.
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.
I've been writing full-time since I was 23.
I live for the text. It's my job.
I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.
Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.
For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.
I tell young people who ask me about a future in writing not to go into it unless they get married to someone rich.
You'd think it would be easier for writers to make a living, but it's not. Fortunately, I love to teach.
Writing is my only interest. Even speaking is an interruption.
Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing
Whether your mother is a novelist like mine or a third-generation military wife, the idea of a son or daughter being in mortal danger is terrifying.
If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you.
