'A reasonable living'?
'These days, almost everybody I meet who's not already a writer wants to become one. Recent Society of Authors statistics show that only seven percent of all writers in this country make a reasonable living (which means that 93 percent do not, as compared with 85 per cent of actors who do not) and yet there's a general clamour to scramble into this strange and lonely arena. Why? Is it that everybody feels they could do it, just as everybody feels they could be ballroom dancers, given a patient tutor and half a chance? Or do they suspect - rightly, it seems to me - that the act of writing can very often awake in the human spirit that elusive and indefinable thing we call happiness?'
Rose Tremain in the Sunday Telegraph