“For most of us, writing is not particularly pleasurable, and publishing does not make us much money.”— J. Robert Lennon, amazon.com
“I think any kind of experience is good for a writer, except sitting at home all the time. If my students have a character who does nothing, I always ask them, 'Well, where does the money come from? How does he live?' And they cannot answer.”— Yiyun Li, amazon.com
“Here are a few other things younger writers don't hear about this career: if you're going to become a writer, you have to start introducing yourself to people. You have to know how to talk. People need to like you in this business, to remember you well.”— Richard Rodriguez, amazon.com
“I was supported by various people early in my writing life. I spent a lot of time lying by swimming pools at other people's houses, housesitting, looking at Italian fashion magazines.”— Richard Rodriguez, amazon.com
“Selling fiction feels like I've cast a spell on the world and made it give me something that didn't exist before. It's the closest thing to actual magic I can think of.”— Alexander Chee, amazon.com
“I wanted to be around people who wrote no matter what they were paid and yet I also wanted to make a living at writing. I was young enough to think this was a serious approach.”— Alexander Chee, amazon.com
“For those who are not writers (and many of those who are), there is an illusory "made it" point, the point at which the writer no longer has to worry about money. It doesn't exist unless you were born someone who didn't ever have to worry about it.”— Alexander Chee, amazon.com
“In almost every other profession, people have a pretty good idea of what others are making, and I think, in writing, among the people I know, people have no idea. And the difference between people who do very well and people who are just getting by is a big range.”— Susan Orlean, amazon.com
“For each person it can be a different financial arrangement. For a long time [at the New Yorker] I did what many writers do, which is agree in the beginning of the year to do a certain number of pieces, and then that amount was paid out to me over the year -- the aggregate of all of that. So I would…”— Susan Orlean, amazon.com
“The reality is, more and more and more, being a writer is running your own business. While I've had salaries, and I've been an employee, overall and ultimately and certainly increasingly so, being a writer is running a small business.”— Susan Orlean, amazon.com
“I have gone to post-book deal hell and all I got was this serious debt. But it's an okay place to be, there are no surprises in debt.”— Porochista Khakpour, amazon.com
“I turn the novel in. I go out to a celebration dinner with a very normal guy I have somehow fallen into dating. I pick at a whole fish and order dessert. I make bathroom visits devoted solely to dropping benzodiazepine crumbs under my tongue, licking any residue off my finger. The novel made it, but…”— Porochista Khakpour, amazon.com
“It was like, my book is on the New York Times bestseller list right now and we do not have any money in our checking account.”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“So I sold my book for $100,000, and what I received was a check for about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the IRS. Don't get me wrong, the book deal helped a lot -- it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn't enough to live off.”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“I had accrued $50,000 in credit card debt to write that book. The same thing happened later with 'Wild', only I was in deeper debt. So I got that check for 'Torch', and it was gone the next day. I actually paid my credit card bill. Poof!”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“I feel strongly that we're only hurting ourselves as writers by being so secretive about money. There's no other job in the world where you get your master's degree in that field and you're like, 'Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million!'”— Cheryl Strayed, amazon.com
“Writing for free looked like work. It felt like work. But it was the illusion of work, a fun house mirror reflection.”— Nina Maclaughlin, amazon.com
“The dreamy writer's life I had envisioned in graduate school, crafted by borrowing my more experienced classmates' lofty expectations as well as my tuition funds, seemed inevitable. Six months later, my novel had been rejected by what seemed like every editor in New York City, I was being paid less…”— Julia Fierro, amazon.com