A Quote by Leo Rosten
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
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One of the ironies of being a professional writer is that, if you are even moderately successful, the very traits that let you succeed as a writer are not much help when the time comes to head out as 'The Author.'
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.
One of the advantages of having gone to Penn State was having had a scholar for a mentor - Philip Young. Also, a professional writer named Philip Klass taught there. He was a science fiction writer whose pseudonym was William Tenn. As a professional writer, he brought wisdom to teaching because he'd done it for a living.
If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.
There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.
Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
Ann Landers said that you are addicted to sex if you have sex more than 3 times a day, and that you should seek professional help. I have news for Ann Landers: The only way I am going to get sex 3 times a day is if I seek professional help.
The reason I'm a writer is to understand other people and myself more. The reason I'm a writer is to dramatize stories about human beings so that it improves my life. So that's a very selfish thing.
It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.
I only go to places if I have a professional reason. I'm not a tourist.
Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.
To see your country being destroyed from afar - it's very hard to only watch and do nothing. My writing is the only way to address my feelings about this disaster and to at least try to find a solution as a writer. I know I have limits. But I have to do my best as a writer.
You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.
With the responsibility of being a professional athlete, I believe that it is on us to go out there and help people.
And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy)
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
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