Top 100 Creative Writer Quotes
#1. For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
#2. Before the day my grandmother shared her treasured letters with me, I honestly wasn't much of a fiction reader, let alone creative writer.
Kristina McMorris
#3. No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.
Mel Brooks
#4. America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
Henry Miller
#5. A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
Sigmund Freud
#6. You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
Nawal El Saadawi
#7. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
Sigmund Freud
#8. If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you.
Tom Drury
#9. The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
#10. I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.
Pattiann Rogers
#11. There are no "great" subjects for the creative writer; there are only the singular details of a single human life.
Richard Selzer
#12. I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature ... I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician
not a "good" politician.
Gayl Jones
#13. The creative writer is usually captive to his next book.
Fannie Hurst
#14. A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.
Roland Barthes
#15. A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
Vladimir Nabokov
#16. There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.
Nelson Algren
#17. The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
Sigmund Freud
#18. To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather
#19. People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.
Wilbur Smith
#20. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#21. I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.
Clint Eastwood
#22. I've always wanted to be a writer. Always been very creative. I always laughed at things that the rest of my family would sort of get angry, like not understand.
Bonnie McFarlane
#23. I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Stephen King
#24. And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.
Tim LaHaye
#25. I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing ... not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
Langston Hughes
#26. Loss is a peculiar thing. It drives creativity, and it fuels the dark emotions that inspire a designer or writer or musician to bring forth a creative child whole-cloth. It is loss that compels creativity.
R.B. Chesterton
#27. How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.
Kate Zambreno
#28. I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.
Rick Moody
#29. 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.
John Dos Passos
#30. 10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer
Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don't want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don't.
Write every day.
Keep writing.
Brian Clark
#31. I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.
Anne Rivers Siddons
#32. You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of those muscles.
Catherine Brady
#33. I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.
William P. Young
#35. I'm a writer, so I interview people all the time, and I think of it as being a very creative process. Giving interviews is actually one of the most creative parts of the film promotion process.
Aaron Rose
#36. The writer's ultimate purpose is to use his gifts to develop man's awareness of himself so that he, man, can become a better instrument for living together with other men. This sense of identity is the root by which all honest creative effort is fed.
Jay Saunders Redding
#37. In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
Salman Rushdie
#38. ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills.
Nick Harkaway
#39. Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.
Paul Kane
#40. My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I'm sitting in front of a typewriter.
Gary Reilly
#41. The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
#42. I've been known to write 10 pages a day for 10 days running before I take a breath. I am not a disciplined writer. I'm one of those people who laughingly call themselves inspirational writers, which basically means someone who has no control over their own creative process.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#43. It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well ... problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#44. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]
Ray Bradbury
#45. I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.
Stewart Butterfield
#46. We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
Maya Angelou
#47. My creative partner is a writer, and he's got an executive producing credit on this film. We've made three films together and I would never underestimate the impact of a writer.
Taylor Hackford
#48. They get the same rush from a well-executed trade that a writer finds in a well-turned paragraph - not because there's money in it, necessarily, but because it takes technical skill and some measure of creative thinking to pull off.
Anonymous
#49. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. Being an author is to have a toe in the creative pool and a foot in the vat of commerce.
Fennel Hudson
#51. There's probably a little more creative freedom in cable versus network, a little less of a committee looking over everyone's shoulder, but it depends on the network; it depends on the show; it depends on who the head writer or show runner is and what track record they have.
Timothy Hutton
#52. I'm not a very creative person, you know? I'm not really an art person. I'm not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.
Tom Brady
#53. Writer's block is as a depression in the earth. Like a river that flows into this depression for a time of rest and tranquility, eventually filling to continue its journey from the lower end of its shore line, so too shall your creative juices flow again.
Everett R. Lake
#54. Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.
Jo Deurbrouck
#55. There is no such thing as an 'unemployed writer', only an unemployed mind
Kevin Cowdall
#56. To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.
Ayn Rand
#57. What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.
R.M. Engelhardt
#58. The best thing about a being a writer is the creative process. I often describe it as a beautiful headache that I wouldn't change for anything.
Nicole Huggins
#61. The hardest period for a writer is the period in-between writing. That's when you can go crazy if you don't allow the creative juices to flow.
Ice Cube
#62. In television, the writer-creator-showrunner is embraced as the creative mind.
Jim Rash
#63. When I was young, I never thought I was going to be a writer! I was academically orientated and active at sports, but I didn't have one creative bone in my body.
Amish Tripathi
#64. Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
#65. Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.
Paul Simon
#66. I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
Samantha Shannon
#67. To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.
Dani Shapiro
#68. As a writer, I marinate, speculate, and hibernate.
Trisha Sugarek
#69. 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.
Doris Lessing
#70. Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer?
Dean Koontz
#71. If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!
Dorothea Benton Frank
#72. You really have to do your job as a writer and push people to be as creative as possible. What's nice about the TV medium is you have such a connection to the characters that when somebody dies, the audience cries. They really feel it. You really don't cry when someone dies in a horror movie.
Glen Mazzara
#73. Some actors, I think, want to feel that they are as creative as the writer. And the answer is, frankly, they're not.
John Cleese
#74. I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
Henning Mankell
#75. The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
Nadine Gordimer
#76. I started creative writing classes at Aberdeen Central Library, and the writer-in-residence there, Todd McEwen, encouraged me a great deal. He showed my stories to his editor, and I thought that was just what happened to everyone who took his classes!
Leila Aboulela
#77. My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.
Bob Balaban
#78. As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.
John Fusco
#79. It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#80. I'm an actor. I'm just a creative person. I figure if I wasn't a good writer, I'd take to renovating homes ... not renovating ... decorating homes.
Andrea Gabriel
#81. He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot ...
John Gardner
#82. Initial work is on period research where the historical markers are absolutely non-negotiable. Once that is established, a writer can take creative liberties in terms of chronology to suit the story.
Ashwin Sanghi
#83. I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative.
B.J. Novak
#84. I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
Stewart O'Nan
#85. In movies, books & even music, to me, the true artist is the writer. Writers have to begin the creative process by making nothing into something before it can ever manifest into anything.
Chris Mentillo
#86. Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Douglas Coupland
#87. To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#88. By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
#89. I try to be a lot of things for the authors I work with - a careful reader, a helpful friend who also happens to be an experienced writer, a thoughtful editor, and a creative midwife.
Kevin Sampsell
#90. Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.
Heather Sellers
#91. As far as my creative urge is concerned, I do sit down and write my own music ... I'll tell you a writer who I think is a genius: Ray Stevens. He comes up with some of the most fantastic novelty ideas. Dolly Parton also writes well. I like a lot of songs, a lot of writers.
Boudleaux Bryant
#92. Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.
Coco J. Ginger
#93. A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.
G. Willow Wilson
#94. Because when I dream, I feel no fear,
And when I am fearless, I am my most creative self.
Nikki Rowe
#95. Great imaginations are the breeding ground for great accomplishments!
Great imaginations are like horses, they need guidance and proper nurturing, only then do they offer the world of adventure they promise.
Marilynn Dawson
#96. All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.
Stephanie Lennox
#97. To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters.
Angelica Hopes
#98. Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Katherine Paterson
#99. Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
Flannery O'Connor
#100. A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.
Richard Hugo
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