Good Creative Writing Quotes

#1. A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.

Richard Hugo

#2. 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.

William P. Young

#3. Writing is like that. You have to have some basic creative spark, and then, if you have that, I feel like you can learn the production side of it. You can learn how to be a good producer. And I guess it does take a certain balance of those two skills in your head to be a successful showrunner.

Ronald D. Moore

#4. 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.

Ernest Hemingway,

#5. I think whatever an artist does, it just has to be quality and good. I think the way Kanye's doing what he's doing with the Auto-Tune is actually creative because he just writes good melodies. He just writes good songs. He's just gifted.

Will Ferrell

#6. 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

#7. I can act ... I do a little writing as well. And I'm good at typing. I'm a creative typist, actually.

Chris Colfer

#8. A good edit process turns rocks into diamonds, and every author should love that part as much as the creative phase. I do love it. It's a different side to writing. It's like the fine-tuning.

Kim Smith

#9. Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

Alice Munro

#10. It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.

Michael O'Brien

#11. The Jungian therapist taught me the difference between the ego and the shadow. I realized I'd been so busy being a good girl that I'd completely detached from my shadow. It's something we all have, and it's where all the creative juices are.

Sue Grafton

#12. That's why, when Alias came along, I knew I'd be OK if the show was on for five or six years because the writing was so good and the creative team was so strong.

Victor Garber

#13. My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco.

Ashley Tisdale

#14. Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]

Cormac McCarthy

#15. To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.

Michael Connelly

#16. Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it.

Aimee Bender

#17. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

Francine Prose

#18. The fun thing about song writing is that it's just creative. It can be whatever you want it to be. For me, I'm really protective of that. I'm not going to write something because I feel like it fits here or it fits there - I just want to write music that feels good to me, you know?

Kelsea Ballerini

#19. A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.

Jay McInerney

#20. 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.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#21. I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.

Teddy Pendergrass

#22. Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose.

Laurie Alberts

#23. A change of work is a good rest for the mind if you're constantly focused on writing. I like to work with timber and be creative on that side sometimes as well.

Angus Stone

#24. To be taken seriously about doing something creative and probably travel a lot. That was my motivation. I knew I was good, I knew I could write. I also knew you could get laid really easily.

David Bowie

#25. Pornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good.

Kenneth Tynan

#26. 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.

Barry Hannah

#27. Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a "life-is-like-this" on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.

Chila Woychik

#28. 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.

Robert Morgan

#29. Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#30. When I started writing, I just wanted to do something different and creative. I first thought neo-soul was a good pathway for me, so I tried that out but realized I didn't want to be placed in that box.

Leon Bridges

#31. I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

Ray Bradbury

#32. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing ... metaphors support lyrics like bones.

Pat Pattison

#33. One professor in college told me flat out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out.

Ellen Potter

#34. To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative.

Erskine Caldwell