Top 100 Quotes About Creative Writing
#1. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
Tess Gerritsen
#2. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#3. Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.
Stephen L. Carter
#4. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#5. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
Madeleine L'Engle
#6. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
Steven Pressfield
#7. Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
Brian Raif
#8. I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.
Simon McBurney
#9. Musicians have notes. Painters have paint. Writers have words.
Lisa Fantino
#10. Mum was thinking 'bout going back to study creative twatting writing. She had a novel in her, whatever the fuck that meant. She was going to do all the stuff that having me when she was twenty had stopped her from doing. She said I'd made her tits little and taken away her identity.
Caroline Smailes
#11. 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.
Aleksandr Voinov
#12. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#13. 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
#14. Perhaps, writing is like the taste of honey sucked from flowers in a garden, each tasting differently.
Anu Lal
#15. 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
#16. Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing.
Zooey Deschanel
#17. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#18. 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
#19. Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
Eli Roth
#20. I went to school for creative writing in college, and I wound up about six hours short of my degree.
Jason Isbell
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Stephen King
#26. First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
Octavia E. Butler
#27. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#28. I love photography. I like to write. I like coaching. I've made jewelry. I'm very creative.
Diandra Asbaty
#29. If you look at the world one way, it takes from you - it's a thief of time, energy, creative mojo. But if you look at the world another way, it gives you an endless supply of motivation.
Julianna Baggott
#31. 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.
John Brandon
#32. The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.
Julia Cameron
#33. What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
#34. It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.
A.D. Posey
#35. Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?
Chang-rae Lee
#36. 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
#37. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
P.D. James
#38. Eyesight can be so blinding. We need to look beyond the face of things.
Fennel Hudson
#39. I enjoy writing the same way I enjoy doing standup. Part of the challenge is being creative and making it work no matter what the constraints.
Greg Fitzsimmons
#40. I feel so fortunate to get paid to be an actor. I pinch myself. I get it from writing, I get it from baking, gardening ... I sort of open myself to the creative flow, which is hard to do, by the way.
Lauren Bowles
#41. 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.
Bob Schieffer
#42. 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
#43. To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.
DiAnn Mills
#44. Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.
Charles Simic
#45. I didn't to be like, "I have to write a new album. I need to get creative."
Shaun Fleming
#46. He's like a cesspool in the midst of my creative writing oasis.
Sandy Hall
#47. I think my one of my strengths in standup is my ability to adlib. I do all my best writing on stage. I can sit down and write jokes, but I'd rather go on stage with a premise or an idea and let the jokes come that way. My creative juices are never flowing any better than when I'm onstage.
Henry Cho
#48. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#49. Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before.
James Newton Howard
#50. When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.
Carla H. Krueger
#51. We are innately creative beings capable of writing a love story worth living, and we cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to experience nourishing relationships.
David Simon
#52. 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
#53. We are doing the most important possible work in the world when we open the door and reveal our creative nature.
It is the work of the Universe itself.
Jacob Nordby
#54. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
#55. Entire universes flourish in my mind. Sometimes I get lost in there.
Janey Colbourne
#56. I minored in creative writing in college, and I've played with the idea of doing something more hybrid, but comics are my first love.
Gene Luen Yang
#58. 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
#59. I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity.
David Wroblewski
#60. No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.
Isaac Asimov
#62. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Cormac McCarthy
#63. It comes a point in which you don't know if you write books or the books write you
Robin Sacredfire
#64. This is what works for me: I practise crop rotation with my creative endeavours. I've found that when the nitrogen runs out in the soil in one field, it's best to leave it fallow for a while and cultivate another.
Andrew Macrae
#65. I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.
[Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]
Nora Ephron
#66. 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.
Robert Greenblatt
#67. I got my undergrad in Creative Writing, and then I didn't get my Masters in obsession, because I figured I already had that covered.
Julie Powell
#68. Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
Dave Eggers
#69. 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
#70. Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person ... Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.
Junot Diaz
#74. 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.
Garry Disher
#75. 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.
Lana Del Rey
#76. In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#77. Habits of an empowerED teacher: "read, notice, think, make theories about how writing works, imagine possibilities, write yourself; it isn't magic, it's just slow, creative work.
Penny Kittle
#78. In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.
Marlon James
#79. Writing is like solving a creative equation.
See Moua
#80. I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down ... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.
Garrett Hedlund
#81. I see caring for somebody as a creative outlet. I like drawing little faces and writing little stories and hiding them in places. I don't think it's that hard to be thoughtful, especially when you do care about the person.
Channing Tatum
#82. I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.
David Cook
#83. Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.
SARK
#84. 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?
Joan Bauer
#85. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.
Don Roff
#86. I've always been an all around creative person. Song writing and writing are great ways for me to express myself.
Manika
#87. My dad was an adventurer, my mother a romantic. When they met in college, both were creative writers; the writing was a bond.
Brian Herbert
#88. When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?'
Marya Hornbacher
#89. A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.
John Steinbeck
#90. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Robert M. Pirsig
#91. My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I'm sitting in front of a typewriter.
Gary Reilly
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Fred Savage
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I love writing. I love getting lost in creative projects when I'm going through a tough transition in life. I always keep in mind that it's not the first time something painful has happened, and just like I got through other troubles, the one at hand will pass as well.
Melanie Iglesias
#98. Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.
Ngaio Marsh
#99. 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.
Crowder
#100. I do believe we should push each other to write better songs and make better music. We do ourselves a disservice if we sit back and float along the river instead of trying to paddle and guide ourselves to a more creative place.
Bonnie Baker
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