Creative Writing Quotes

1. "Described as a "workaholic speed-writing freak" by fellow writers, a "creative writing class drill sergeant" by his writing 'padawans', Voinov is a self-confessed geek and has enlarged his days by 12 secret hours in return for the sacrifice of ten albino virgin pygmy hippos."
Author: Aleksandr Voinov

2. "If creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old (known) abstraction (theme or thesis) through the medium of old fiction means (that is, characters, events or situations used before for that same purpose, that same translation) -- this is most of the popular trash; translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means -- this is most of the good literature; creating a new, original abstraction and translating it through new, original means. This, as far as I know, is only me -- my kind of fiction writing."
Author: Ayn Rand

3. "Programming was very different from mathematics, as it was far more creative. In math, there was one right answer, and you worked at a problem until you got to that answer. In programming, there were an infinite number of answers that could be considered correct, just as there might be when writing a book. But the results of programming, unlike a written story, were tangible. Your program had to actually do something."
Author: B.V. Larson

4. "11Mcdanielmedit profilefriendshelpswitch to mobilesign outHome My Books Groups Recommendationsgenreslistopiagiveawayspopulargoodreads voiceebooksfuntriviaquizzesquotescommunitycreative writingpeopleeventsExplore Find QuotesFind quotes Even now dread still struck her down sometimes if she found herself counting on things being fine"
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

5. "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."
Author: Bharati Mukherjee

6. "And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing."
Author: Bob Schieffer

7. "Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better."
Author: Catie Curtis

8. "I write my novels longhand. I love the feeling of writing; I love to see pen on paper. It feels more creative than typing, and it's a more visual process for me - I can picture the entire scene in my head and am merely writing what I see."
Author: Cecelia Ahern

9. "I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it."
Author: Charles Frazier

10. "Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living."
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

11. "If you haven't the creative urge, or if it is fulfilled elsehow, then, although you may be a skilled craftsman, writing the most delightful letters to your friends, the most lucid reports to your superiors, you will never produce a poem or a play or a story. You may make a journalist but you will never make an author."
Author: Christopher Milne

12. "I told him I wanted to major in creative writing and sit around in yoga pants and do nothing but write books eat ice cream every day."
Author: Colleen Hoover

13. "There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part."
Author: Cynthia Weil

14. "That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them."
Author: Cynthia Weil

15. "But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned, and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand à la charté des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spanning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes."
Author: Edith Wharton

16. "Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over."
Author: Eric Brown

17. "I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing."
Author: Etgar Keret

18. "Anytime you put yourself in a creative box, it's going to stifle you; it's not conducive to the writing or recording process."
Author: Frank Iero

19. "I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer."
Author: Fred Savage

20. "George Harrison is perhaps one of the most creative people I ever met, not only in his music and songwriting, but just the way he lived his life, decorated his gardens and homes. He was a dear friend of mine. His entire approach to music was very unique."
Author: Gary Wright

21. "Do not let any record company disturb your creative flow. You are not writing for the record company. You're writing for the public."
Author: Grandmaster Flash

22. "In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the "Way of the brush"—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the "Way of flowers." Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular."
Author: H.E. Davey

23. "I am less selfish. But I am more insistent on being part of the creative experience. I find I am a better mother, lover and wife when I am writing. When my daughter was small I wasn't writing as much and I didn't miss it."
Author: Helen Slater

24. "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."
Author: Ian Rankin

25. "Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing."
Author: James Fenton

26. "After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more."
Author: Jasper Fforde

27. "Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago."
Author: Jasper Fforde

28. "A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors."
Author: Jay McInerney

29. "Harrison wrote a two-page poem about his deep feelings of loss when his dog Filbert died, and Mrs. Minerva, the creative writing teacher, gave it a B-minus. Do you know what that does to a a person to get a B-minus in Grief?"
Author: Joan Bauer

30. "Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum"Write about what you know." But whether you're writingabout people or dragons, your personal observation of howthings happen in the world—how character reveals itself—canturn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advicemight be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactlywhat is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,not that they can necessarily write it down."
Author: John Gardner

31. "I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who have different tastes. And I have written enough books now that I know the self-doubt and the anxiety are part of the creative process, and drive me to keep trying to do better, and keep me from becoming too cocksure about my writing, which is a form of creative death."
Author: Kate Forsyth

32. "Buster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip 'N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk."
Author: Kevin Wilson

33. "I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly."
Author: Khaled Hosseini

34. "I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn't think I'd have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn't know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing."
Author: Lana Del Rey

35. "Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have."
Author: Lorrie Moore

36. "I used to write in bed, starting when I woke up. I believe that creative work comes from our subconscious mind, so I try to keep the gap between sleep and writing as minimal as possible."
Author: Marian Keyes

37. "Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
Author: Marilyn Hacker

38. "Kids are naturally inventive and curious and creative, but most adults have had that beaten out of them. Writing is a form of play; you have to get rid of all those internal censors that we adults have, the things that say, 'Don't go there, that's not allowed.'"
Author: Monica Ali

39. "There's nothing about me on the jacket because I have no credentials. I majored in English at school, but I only took one creative writing class. I think I got a B. And I never really thought about getting an MFA. I'm too spiteful to take criticism constructively and I'm only comfortable being honest about people behind their backs, so workshops or group critiques were never what I was looking for. For years I just wrote in journals and didn't really worry about turning any of it into stories or stuff for other people to read, so I guess I developed my writing style by talking to myself, like some homeless people do. Only I used a pen and paper instead of just freaking out on the street. If they switched to a different medium they might be better off. It would probably help if they had someplace to live too."
Author: Paul Neilan

40. "I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern."
Author: Peter Coyote

41. "Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen" (pg 181)"
Author: Preeti Shenoy

42. "Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority."
Author: Rachel Cusk

43. "I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor."
Author: Rachel Kushner

44. "Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better."
Author: Richelle E. Goodrich

45. "Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner; you evaluate the creative and how the show is run, how the writing staff works."
Author: Robert Greenblatt

46. "Johnson's later life, from 1763, is among the best documented of all literary lives. James Boswell gave himself the enormous task, after Johnson's death in 1784, of producing what is now held to be a model of biography; rich in detail and anecdote, a complete picture of the man and his times, traced over a period of more than twenty years. Boswell's Life of Johnson, published in 1791, carries on Johnson's own contribution to the growing art of biography, and consolidates Johnson's position as a major literary figure, who, although a poet and a novelist, is remembered more for his academic and critical achievement than for his creative writings."
Author: Ronald Carter

47. "I would be sad if it ended now. It's been the best job I've had by a long shot, especially creatively because the writing is so good. Every week I get the script and I laugh out loud and get excited for the different stuff we get to do."
Author: Sarah Chalke

48. "I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing."
Author: Sarah Harrison

49. "I think we're actually talking about creative sleep. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream."
Author: Stephen King

50. "Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing."
Author: Willa Cather

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