Top 1200 Professional Writer Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

When something looks really risky from the outside, what people are doing on the inside - they're not professional risk takers. But they're probably professional risk mitigators.

I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.

I operated a professional football team in L.A. By no means was it the NFL, but I understand what it takes on some level to build and operate a professional sports enterprise in Los Angeles.

After a couple of years in a professional setting, you'll get used to dressing presentably, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing professional correspondence, etc.

writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me.

I want to be identified as a writer, not a Southern writer, not a woman writer, not a woman from this or that place, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.

It's fun to get the script every Monday morning and go, "Cool!" I'm a professional actor, but I'm also a professional story lover. I get off on that thrill.

I was told I have to work 10 years to get a doctorate. Well, I have worked all that time to become a doctor in professional wrestling. So to speak, I have a Ph.D. in professional wrestling.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

Nobody becomes a writer overnight. Well, I'm sure somebody did, but that person's head probably went all asplodey from paroxysms of joy, fear, paranoia, guilt and uncertainty. Celebrities can be born overnight. Writer's can't. Writers are made - forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities - over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same writer you become.

The only thing I've ever wanted to do is play professional football, and be a professional quarterback, so now that it's here and it's getting close, it's just kind of making all that pain and suffering and waiting and working hard worth it.

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

The Professional Children's School, it's for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn't really like school all that much.

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

During the holidays, professional players would come and say hello to us in the academy and that really made you want to be a professional. When you saw what great conditions they lived in, it gave you even more desire.

I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I'm still trying to be a good writer. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

I've come to realize I'm a professional, no matter if I'm 38, no matter if I'm 19 or 20. I'm a professional.

Somebody comes to my house and admires what I've done, sometimes I just give it to them. Because I don't want to get it all tied up in all that professional stuff because I have to do that as a writer. I don't need that. I need something like painting, where I can just play.

If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

Often, you have to fail as a writer before you write that bestselling novel or ground-breaking memoir. If you're failing as a writer - which it definitely feels like when you're struggling to write regularly or can't seem to earn a living as a freelance writer - maybe you need to take a long-term perspective.

I'm not a professional politician. I'm a professional problem solver.

I think the digital revolution and the opportunity for smaller brands to get big platforms now is fantastic for professional wrestlers and professional wrestling in general.

Aunt Lovey used to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed a writer's voice. 'Read,' she'd say, 'and if you have a writer's voice, one day it will shout out, 'I can do that too!

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

I don't think of myself as a producer. In television, it's part of the business - if you progress and become successful as a writer, you're called a writer-producer. What that means is that you have a lot of say in casting and behind-the-scenes stuff. But I'm just a writer.

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

Professional managers, coaches, and players have a right to question an umpire's decision if they do it in a professional manner. When they become personal, profane, or violent, they have crossed the line and must be dealt with accordingly.

Prior to Box, I was a professional wiffleball player and then a professional poker player.

You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.

I don't believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional, and it is all personal.

I wanted to be a professional athlete. Young men and women from Montana don't make it to the professional level that often. And I always believed that because I was a great football player that made me better than you. And that's not the case at all.

I knew nothing about professional comedians when I became a comedian. I was a rabbi. So I had no professional comedians to learn from.

In the end, the difference between a published writer and an unpublished one comes down to one thing: The unpublished writer gave up, and the published writer didn't.

If you want to be a professional writer then you need to write consistently. Inspiration strikes about once every blue moon which, for me, is once every two and a half to three months, which is when I'll get really and truly inspired about something.

As a producer, I'm trying to challenge myself to just make something that is of a professional quality - not necessarily pop music, but maybe in the sense that Nine Inch Nails is professional quality.

I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.

When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that.

I try to always step up to the plate, be professional, be good at what I'm doing and deliver on the character. In Hollywood, what more can you ask for. You want a consummate professional.

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel.

I think the biggest advice I can offer is don't just pick one story and stop, write as much as you can, as many stories as you can. The best thing about being a writer is, a writer's craft is nearly perfect because a writer can go anywhere and do his craft.

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Perhaps the writer I've read the most of is Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer, but I wouldn't necessarily say he's a favourite. I read him because I find his work so intriguing, but I don't necessarily feel I would follow this writer to the ends of the earth.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

I'm not a professional politician. I'm a professional problem solver, and I believe we should cut the salaries of senators and congressmen 10 percent until they balance the budget. I call that conservative common sense.

I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.

When a young writer deliberately tries to create an effect, the result is often a little self-conscious and overdone. But why is it so hard for us to glory in what the writer has tried to do, or even in the very fact that the writer has deliberately tried to do something?

I'm inclined to believe that most Negro leaders, professional Negroes are professional Negroes. Being a Negro is their professional, and being a profe - a leader is their profession. And usually they say exactly what the white man wants - wants to hear them say.

I've heard some writers say things like, 'Well, I'm a professional writer. I only start books I know I can finish.' I look at it maybe the other way: I only want to write books I'm not sure I can write.

I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.

Being a professional athlete, people respect the fact that I respect eSports professional gamers.