“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.”
Source: The Carrie Diaries
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Candace Bushnell 75
American author 1958Related quotes

In Joy Still Felt (1980), pp. 286-287
General sources

"A Message About Messages" in CBC Magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20051128074549/http://www.cbcbooks.org/cbcmagazine/meet/leguin_ursula_k.html

Interview with Metro Weekly, March 12, 2002

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

“I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.”
an interview with kiran desai http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0599/desai/interview.html, Random House

On how he wants to be perceived as a writer in “Édouard Louis: 'I want to be a writer of violence. The more you talk about it, the more you can undo it'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/09/edouard-louis-i-want-to-be-a-writer-of-violence-the-more-you-talk-about-it-the-more-you-can-undo-it in The Guardian (2018 Jun 9)

"The Shadowland of Dreams"', published in Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (1996) by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Maida Rogerson, Martin Rutte and Tim Clauss; also in Alex Haley : The Man Who Traced America's Roots (2007), a collection of stories and essays by Haley published in Reader's Digest between 1954 to 1991.
Context: Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there’s a big difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.