Just came across this quote and immediately thought of this subreddit. Stephen King on his years working as a high-school English teacher before selling Carrie, his first novel:
“I thought by teaching school I was ensuring myself a middle-class life. I didn't think it meant poverty. Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your ears, draining all the juice out of you. You come home, you have papers to correct, and you don't feel like writing. We were planning to have a car, we were supposed to have a real life, and we were worse off than when I was [working] at the laundry.”