After Quote by David Quammen

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

— Naguib Mahfouz

I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that,…

— Mordecai Richler

I knew I wanted to write professionally and get paid.

— Courtney A. Kemp

I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.

— Damien Chazelle

I was getting rewarded for writing well, from about the age of five or six. A teacher would say, "Look what Andrew has written,"…

— Andrew Davies

Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally…

— Janet Evanovich

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

— Leonard Cohen

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published…

— Kent Haruf

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began…

— Harper Lee

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and…

— David Suchet

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it…

— David B. Coe

I always wanted to write. But honestly I'm glad I didn't do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it's now clear…

— Chris Pavone