Best creative & creative-writing Quotes

“I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Book Class Creative Advice Approach Brilliant Not Sure Creative Writing Suitable

Author:Ian Rankin

“I was an A student and I liked creative writing.”

Writing Creative Students Creative Writing

Author:Trisha Yearwood

“I was a journalism major, and I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction instead of term papers. Sometimes they’d say yes.”

“Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.”

Writing Said Two Ends Creative Flower Drink Taste Advertising Brown Bottles Ads Creative Writing Slogans Spit Cigar Billboards

Book:The Good Life According to Hemingway

Source: The Good Life According to Hemingway

“There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

Should Writing Different Problem Faces Young Courses Creative Generations Taught Solve Creative Writing Seminars Previous Generations

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se.”

Thinking Writing I Can Book Creative Visuals Creative Writing

Author:Jeff VanderMeer

“I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.”

Writing Believe I Believe Creative Lessons Creative Writing Specifics

Author:Jeff VanderMeer

“An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.”

“There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.”

Writing Pain Creative Color Definitions Flavor Adequate Creative Writing

Author:Fannie Hurst

“A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.”

Knows Want Writing Young Courses Can Do Novel Creative Taught College Late Mark Chess Novelists Creative Writing Typewriters Novel Writing

Author:James M. Cain

“After I started publishing poetry I got to teach creative writing. Eventually I was promoted and even got tenure. But then I felt compelled to drop everything and move. But I've been teaching for a long time. More than four decades.”

Writing Long Moving Felt Teach Creative Four Teaching Long Time Decades Publishing Compelled Creative Writing Tenure

Author:Joan Larkin

“For some reason there's this myth that creativity - [especially] in terms of creative writing - is a gift you either have, or you don't. So when people first start writing, if they write something that's not very good, or if they try and it's difficult, they go, "Oh, I guess I don't have it." That doesn't seem very fair, you have to try and you have to work at it. If we get scared of one bad poem and quit, that's not doing anybody any good.”

People Ifs Writing Trying Firsts Reason Seems Difficult Term Creativity Creative Fairs Very Good Scared Myth Quitting Creative Writing

Author:Sarah Kay

“I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.”

Ifs Needs Writing I Can Literature Imagination Creative Majors Creative Writing Workshops Writing Workshop

Author:Vikas Swarup

“I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.”

People Writing Humans Matter Desire Motivation Asks Creative Degrees Complexity Contradiction Creative Writing Examination Complexity Of Human

Book:Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There

“I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.”

“I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.”

Writing Years Long Fiction Class Creative Couple University Senior Creative Writing Workshops Carols Joyce Princeton Senior Year Princeton University

Author:Mohsin Hamid

“From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.”

Knows Writing Years Action Fiction Creative Teaching Serious Elements Deserve Setting Settings Granted Treatment Creative Writing Fiction Writing

Author:Garry Disher

“The best and only true history we have. Everyone interested in creative writing should know this book.”

Knows Should Writing Book Creative Creative Writing

Author:Tony Ardizzone

“A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.”

Writing Creative Teacher Creative Writing Good Writers

Author:Richard Hugo

“I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.”

People Thinking Way Want Writing Humans I Can Soul Jobs Space Creative Letting Go Reach Out Be Creative Creative Writing Human Soul

Author:William P. Young

“People didn't know certain things about me, which... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.”

“I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.”

Thinking Knows Writing Believe Ideas Creative Worst Students Terrible Mets Majors Creative Writing Bad Ideas Undergraduate

Author:Barry Hannah

“One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.”

People Feels Writing Facts Courses Novel Creative Degrees Prepared University Offering Unfortunate Creative Writing Incentives Impatient Unfortunate Things

Author:Robert Dessaix

“I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you're doing, you're not doing it as well as you can. Don't think about publishing, don't think about editors, don't think about marketplace.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Humans Wells Self Eye Consciousness Enemy Creativity Creative Mirrors Editors Publishing Creative Writing Marketplace Doing You Self Consciousness

Author:Andre Dubus

“I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Humans Self Consciousness Enemy Creativity Creative Creative Writing Self Consciousness

Author:Andre Dubus

“Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.”

Writing Years Wanted Creative College Decided Grades Composer Composition Creative Writing Eighth Grade

Author:Joanna Newsom

“I certainly wasn't born with creative writing. Maybe there's a certain amount of learning and then it's up to the person. I think in the end it's your favourite books that are the best teachers. That's the way I've learned the most, by far.”

Thinking Way Writing Persons Book Ends Certain Born Creative Teacher Amount I've Learned Favourite Creative Writing Best Teacher Favourite Book

Author:Markus Zusak

“Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.”

Giving Writing Practice Creative Perspective Description Accurate Creative Writing

Author:Ernest Hemingway

“I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.”

Writing My Own Fiction Teach Practice Creative Teaching Approach Genre Creative Writing Non Fiction Phds

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.”

“I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.”

Writing Sleep Creative Car Poet Grew Dad Grew Up Cat Window My Dad Novelists Highways Creative Writing Wrecks Sleeping In Apprenticeship Car Wreck

Author:Lucinda Williams

“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

“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

“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

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