A Quote by William S. Burroughs
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Related Quotes
The best advice that anyone can give you for choosing a specific career is never to accept someone else's advice. Indeed, one of the biggest reasons for choosing the career you have chosen should be that no one told you to.
The most difficult thing about living as a writer is precisely 'having to write.' Pretending to be a writer is easy. Living freely, reading many books, going on frequent trips, cultivating minor eccentricities... but genuinely being a writer is difficult, because you have to write something that will convince both yourself and readers.
Because all writers are human beings first and writers second, my guess is that any advice for living with a writer is about the same as advice for living with a plumber or a refrigerator salesperson.
Seek other people's advice, but don't take orders. And don't take 100% of anyone's advice. Make sure every decision you make is a product of your own conclusion. Be a student, not a disciple.
I wouldn't trade my career with anybody's. I'd trade a few movies with Tom Hanks - 'Apollo 13 and 'Forrest Gump' - but other than that, I love my career.
I wouldn't trade my career with anybody's. I'd trade a few movies with Tom Hanks - 'Apollo 13' and 'Forrest Gump' - but other than that, I love my career.
If you can get sexual attention and then (or therefore) succeed as a writer - or [fill in career blank] - that means you're a writer worthy of literary respect?
The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.
I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.
It's different for every writer. It's not a career for anyone who needs security. It's a career for gamblers. It's a career of ups and downs.
The best piece of advice I ever received about being a writer came from my brother Lee. I was just starting out and he told me that if I wanted to have a long career, I had to be versatile, that I shouldn't just think of myself in one way, because there would come a time when maybe that one thing wasn't working out for me - and I'd still want to earn a living as a writer.
I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live; he observes.
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.
I rarely need career advice because I don't have a career. No, that's not true. I can't really go far away while my kids are living with me.
One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.
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