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Creative Writing Quotes

Browse 468 quotes about Creative Writing.

Creative Writing Quotes

“I kind of came from the Townes Van Zandt school of throwing yourself off a cliff and then that's what you write about, and that rule number one of creative writing is you have to have conflict. But if you write about yourself mostly, then if you don't have conflict, then you create it. And the older I get, the more I realize that that's not a very smart way to do this. Not to say I'm the most self destructive person on earth, but it's easy to do.”

“All the things that live within you find their place, in character and story, once you tap into that other space that is the creative writing space.”

Writing Character Stories Space Creative Within You Creative Writing

Author:Francesca Gregorini

“The fact is that I write under duress, often in my bed, often at the last minute. I'm kind of a binge writer I would say, which I don't support. I was always kind of that way. Probably the time I was the most regular as a writer was college. It was like, what else is there to do when you're living in the Midwest studying creative writing?”

Way Writing Kind Facts Lasts Support Creative Study Minutes College Bed Creative Writing Midwest Last Minute Binge Duress

Author:Lena Dunham

“Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.”

Writing Art Literature Half Trade Creative Writing

Author:William Ralph Inge

“The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!”

People Should Writing Littles Long Book Today Bits Class Teach Creative Little Bit Pages Plot Creative Writing

Author:Douglas Adams

“A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.”

People Way Writing Said Problem Inspiration Attention Creative Special Conditions Poet Demand Madness Concentration Vocation Creative Writing

Author:Stephen Spender

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”

Source: A Gift of Wings

“We really had the whole piece laid out in like a Word file, just from beginning to end. It was kind of more like your creative-writing class in school. You know, you have the outline and then you just kind of plug the stuff in the little map you've made.”

Knows Writing Kind Littles Made Ends Whole School Stuff Class Creative Pieces Like You Maps Creative Writing Files Outlines Plugs Classes In School

Author:Crowder

“In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.”

Writing Stills Age School Literature Fiction Creative Taught High School Prose Grammar Creative Writing Non Fiction Sixteen Prose And Poetry

Author:Margaret Atwood

“In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.”

Writing Wanted School Courses Creative College High School Decided Actresses Novelists Creative Writing

Author:Meg Cabot

“Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?”

Thinking Knows Should Writing Littles Lasts Guy Creative Saws Teacher Please Labor Blind Combat Camps Creative Writing Confined Harps Instructors Iliad

Author:P. J. O'Rourke

“I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier.”

Giving Writing Doe Made Care Stuff Creative Focus Teaching Give Me Angry Professors Creative Writing Golfers Profile Make Me Happy Great Happiness

Author:Tod Goldberg

“I'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done traditionally in the academy...wherever that academy is...but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.”

Knows Writing Done Opinion Creative Teaching Broken Personality Approach Program Relate Creative Writing Academy Pollyanna

Author:Tod Goldberg

“My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories.”

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Author:Tod Goldberg

“I haven't taught creative writing all that much (my CW teaching consists of a few summer workshops for elementary school children and an eight-week class for older adults), and I don't really know what my teaching style is yet.”

Knows Writing Children School Class Creative Week Teaching Style Havens Taught Summer Adults Eight Creative Writing Workshops Elementary School Older Adults

Author:Mary J. Miller

“The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.”

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Author:Chad Harbach

“I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.”

Ifs Writing Years Art School Language Numbers Wonder Creative Art Is Backgrounds Visuals Graduates Creative Writing Potters Visual Art Graduate School Materiality

Author:Anna Journey

“None of my English teachers in college were praising me or telling me I was anything special. But then in creative writing classes they were. And I enjoyed those more anyway.”

Writing Class Creative Teacher Special College Praise Enjoyed Creative Writing English Teacher

Author:John Brandon

“hough I was creative, I also liked math and science. At Knox College, I studied creative writing and earned a degree in chemistry, thinking I would attend medical school. Ultimately, I decided that a career in nursing would allow more time for pursuing other creative interests. While I worked as an RN, I wrote stories inspired by my patients, designed t-shirts, and made hand-painted sandals.”

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

“When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.”

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Author:Edward Hirsch

“In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?”

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Author:Yuriy Tarnawsky

“The ways in which a standardized language test induces storytelling, for example, is the opposite of creative writing; you have to learn a logical way to start a story, whereas in creative writing you may begin at the end or begin at the middle of the story.”

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Author:Alejandro Zambra

“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

Writing Night Every Night Creative Writing Rest Of Your Life Homework

Author:Lawrence Kasdan

“As I tell my intro creative writing students, after reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write.”

Writing Reading Waiting Hours Creative Students Starting Creative Writing One You Love Someone You Love Starting To Write

Author:Matthew Healy

“I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.”

Writing Years States Stories Creative Program Twenties University Short Story Creative Writing San Francisco And Off Writing Short Writing Short Stories

Author:Andrew Lam

“When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.”

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Author:Robert Hass

“The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.”

Writing Facts Creative Program Genre Creative Writing

Author:Robert Hass

“The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.”

Knows Writing School Creative College High School Formulas Creative Writing

Author:Toni Morrison

“The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it.”

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Author:Toni Morrison

“I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.”

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Author:Stephen Dobyns

“I have ALWAYS wanted to write - I was the seven-year old entering local library poetry contests, and I recently found my eighth-grade yearbook when we moved, and I had listed "WRITER" as my future occupation. It's always been something I've been hungry to do, but I think the more practical side of me (encouraged by the more practical sides of my parents of course) shied away from pursuing a career in creative writing, in favor of something a little "safer" like law.”

“I know people who've passed every creative writing course under the sun and who are more analytically intelligent and far better-read than I, but who just can't write either fiction or drama. It's like any art-form. In order for talent to be developed, crafted, it's got to be there in the first place.”

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Author:Suhayl Saadi

“For me, being a good creative writing teacher is actually kind of being a good therapist. The line is very porous - you can also be a creepy guru/abusive therapist, too, so you have to be very careful. But it feels really important to me.”

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Author:Annie Baker

“I try to be realistic with students. And say that there's a good chance that they're not going to get a creative writing teaching job, that there aren't enough jobs to go around and the university faculties are cutting back on staff and that they may have to get some other kind of work. None of them wants to hear that, but it is true and I think I'm a good example for them of somebody who took the other route.”

Thinking Writing Trying Kind Enough Chance Creative Cutting Teaching Students Realistic Creative Writing

Author:Ted Kooser

“For a while the creative writing community sort of sprung out of places like Iowa and Syracuse. The graduates sort of went out, and they would found creative writing departments in the little colleges where they went, and then some of those would found other ones. I mean every college has got a creative writing department, so where are the jobs coming from? There are not any jobs out there.”

Writing Mean Community Creative College Graduates Creative Writing Sprung

Author:Ted Kooser

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.”

Source: On writing: a memoir of the craft

“Grading creative writing is always an ethical dilemma. But what you brought up about grading personal stories versus the research paper is of course a truly volatile issue in teaching memoir or the personal essay, because there's no pretense that the narrator is a character.”

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Author:Debra Monroe

“When Robert Bly visited Interlochen Center for the Arts so many years ago, he spoke to the creative writing majors and said, "The eye reports to the brain, but the ear reports to the heart." Perhaps this is the thing that musicians can do that writers can't ever, quite, but it is what I aspire to, that sense/power of the auditory, and the belief that to hear more clearly is to see more clearly, and that to see more clearly is to feel more deeply.”

Writing Heart Art Eye Belief Brain Creative Musician Creative Writing

Author:Jack Driscoll

“I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.”

Writing Trying Long Different Done Break Creative Honor Program Creative Writing Translations

Author:Miroslav Penkov

“Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.”

Writing Ideas Difficult Trouble Simplicity Creative Writing

Book:Leacock on Life

Source: Leacock on Life

“I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”

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Author:Doris Lessing

“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

Men Character Motivational Action Virtue Environment Honesty Integrity Helping Others Creative Writing Interpreter Thoughts And Actions Words And Actions Good Actions

Book:An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: An analysis of Mr. Locke's Doctrine of ideas .... A defense of Mr. Locke's Opinion concerning personal identity .... A treatise on the conduct of the understanding. Some thoughts concerning reading and study for a gentleman. Elements of natural philosophy. A new method of a common place book. Extracted from the author's works. With a life of the author

Source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: An analysis of Mr. Locke's Doctrine of ideas .... A defense of Mr. Locke's Opinion concerning personal identity .... A treatise on the conduct of the understanding. Some thoughts concerning reading and study for a gentleman. Elements of natural philosophy. A new method of a common place book. Extracted from the author's works. With a life of the author

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

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Book:Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer

Source: Jack London on Adventure: Words of Wisdom from an Expert Adventurer

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.”

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Author:Don Marquis

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

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Author:W. Somerset Maugham

“I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.”

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Author:James A. Michener

“I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”

Thinking Writing Creative Industry Creative Writing American Poetry

Author:Robert Morgan

“I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.”

Thinking Writing Years Has Beens Enough Seems Past Fiction Creative Program Creative Writing American Poetry

Author:Robert Morgan