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Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.
Sep 10, 2025
Do it because you love it. Then it’s not a job. I’m a geek. I love technology. I would be online working with technology regardless of what my day job is.
I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.
Real estate is my life. It is my day job, if you will. But it consumes my nights and weekends, too.
I'm almost thirty and my day job is folding shirts at the Gap. Have you seen my room? I'm not messy. I'm rebelling against folding.
Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
If there's anything better than a God-given talent, it's a God-given day job.
I can't wait to front my band with these new songs and play for fans, but I've decided to keep my day job too.
My dream was to not get a day job but to sleep, wake up and do my music. I want to keep that dream forever.
For me, the day job comes first. That's why I call myself a diplomat who writes, not a writer who masquerades as a diplomat. If the day job demands it, I won't write at all. I write in what I call 'the crevices of my day job', and that comes only on weekends.
Writing responds well to some gentle scheduling. A day job not only promotes solvency, it promotes creativity as well.
I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory.
I'm not trying to conquer Hollywood. I love my day job.
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
When I received my first paycheck from my now known day job, I spent it on a period Craftsman chair and a Frank Lloyd Wright-wannabe lamp. With my second paycheck, I bought a stereo.
I still have every record company sending every new, hot track to me, to do music videos, so I'm chained by the foot to pop culture. I still know what kids dress like and speak like, and I still hang out with them. It's just the nature of my day job. I am a freak of nature that has to understand them.
Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians. ... We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phony world of politics.
If it really was a no-brainer to make it on your own in business there'd be millions of no-brained, harebrained, and otherwise dubiously brained individuals quitting their day jobs and hanging out their own shingles. Nobody would be left to round out the workforce and execute the business plan.
You know, I didn't have enough money to quit my day job... the myth of the major label deal. Nowadays, you have a tour bus and a stylist and all this stuff. But back then, no way.
[Having bigger budget] allowed me to be a full-time filmmaker for a couple months and not have to have a day job and be balancing a bunch of other stuff. It allowed me to bring in all these people from different parts of the country. It allows me to have an actual food budget, where we could eat healthy for the month we were shooting. It makes all the difference in the world.
Most people like me are having a tough time. But it's fine. I don't really think about it as a career. I don't need to have a million bucks, but it keeps me in music and without a day job, so it's working out fine.
Gandhi was only minding his own business when he took a walk to get some salt and ended up overthrowing the British Empire. You can't set out to overthrow an empire, but if you have to get some salt then get some salt. If you have to write some independent songs that are honest, just write them. If you have to do a day job stacking shelves, so be it.
I quit my day job the day my daughter was born. I remember flying to Cleveland and hitting a thunderstorm, which caused the plane to lose pressure, and the oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. We felt the plane dropping; the pilot was taking it down to regain cabin pressure. My heart was in my stomach. I found out after landing that her mom was in labor. I did the show and came back to New York. By the time I walked into the hospital, my daughter was being born. She was waiting for me. She's a sweet daddy's girl. She's premed. She has her own pie company. She works for Habitat for Humanity.
I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.
I have a day job Monday to Friday. I work at a record label in Brooklyn called Ba Da Bing. It's a great indie label and I listen to music all day. I meet people online and find out about the cool new music blogs.
Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love.
I call 'Community' the best day job in the world, because between takes, I get to write music. I get to write sketches. I get to write movies. It's the best job ever.
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Begin to live each day as if it was your last.
If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right
To make the revolution in the United States is a slow day by day job that requires patience and discipline. It is the only way to make it. . . . All I know is that despite the fact that I am one of the people who benefit from a capitalist society, I find that any system which exploits other people cannot and should not exist.
Even when I was struggling and had horrible day jobs and wanted to be successful but wasn't finding my way in, I knew what I had to do. I knew I had to keep working at it and keep putting material out there, even if no one was paying me for it.
I have a day job. I can make movies when I want to.
I was frustrated because I couldn't get going, as I was trying to figure out how to make films. I had various jobs, I taught a SAT class, I was a bartender, I had a day job at an office and was making short films.
Before MTV, if you put out an album that sold 50,000 copies, your band could afford not to have day jobs for a while. That meant you could stick around, put out another album or two. Maybe it would be the second or third album where you'd make the statement you'd been trying to make all along.
Listen, my day job is also Chief Creative Officer for Marvel, and it's a very painful job because we publish a lot of books, and there are things I see where I can punch people out. Therefore, we have some new people now, and the kids are going to read our books.
I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.
Can I just tell you the truth? I get asked to do a lot of stuff. And all of the years that people have asked me to do things for the film festival, I couldn't. And so this year, I thought, "Oh, my god, I don't have a day job. If somebody ask me to do something, I'm going to do it."
Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
Work hard at work worth doing.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
We all exist in similar systems that mirror and reproduce the same American culture for the most part. What Oscar Wilde said about the lucky author who has a non-literary day job no longer holds, if it ever did. Artists seek validation as much as they seek money. The creation and invention of culture and canon is where most of the trouble lies.
A lot of people these days are too ambitious; their sights are set too high at the start and they end up diving in too deep, quitting their day job too soon. They move to Vegas or wherever, make an all-or-nothing commitment before they're ready, and burn out.
The summer gig turned into my day job. I was an arts administrator who helped make indie flicks. At the filmmakers' encouragement, I tried shooting a couple of shorts of my own. Directing was stressful, it was not my strength. But writing the scripts and helping others with their scripts - that was a gas. Making stuff up the way I wanted to see it was the biggest kick I ever experienced.
I consider acting a day job - it's not my dream; it's not my be-all, end-all.
I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.
Don't assume that the way that one searches and researches is the same from one era to another - it isn't. In the 19th century, most research was done by amateurs: either individuals who were rich or individuals who had a day job. In the 20th century, most researchers worked at universities or think tanks and received money from the government or from foundations to pursue their work. In our time, the sources of support and the locations for research may be quite different.