Top 100 Quotes About Creative Writing
#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.
Aleksandr Voinov
#2. 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
#3. Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
Eli Roth
#4. I went to school for creative writing in college, and I wound up about six hours short of my degree.
Jason Isbell
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. He's like a cesspool in the midst of my creative writing oasis.
Sandy Hall
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#19. In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.
Marlon James
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.
Sigmund Freud
#25. Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.
Michael Winter
#26. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#27. 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
#28. In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.
Meg Cabot
#29. Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?
P. J. O'Rourke
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Peter Coyote
#33. I pretty much spent my twenties as a musician and taking acting classes. I loved it. I was at UCLA getting As and Bs in English and creative writing, basically trying to stay out of the Army. All I really wanted to do was play music.
Robert David Hall
#34. I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
Jennifer Weiner
#35. I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
Orson Scott Card
#36. I'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done traditionally in the academy ... wherever that academy is ... but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.
Tod Goldberg
#37. Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#38. If I were to go back to the Philippines, I would probably end up teaching creative writing at a university. I wouldn't be able to write, for I would become too jaded to be able to view the existing situation objectively.
Miguel Syjuco
#39. A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.
Antony Beevor
#41. I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.
Gia Coppola
#42. We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.
Stephen Kuusisto
#43. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
David Knopfler
#45. I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Robert Morgan
#46. A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.
Richard Hugo
#47. A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
Jay McInerney
#48. I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
John Updike
#49. I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'
Harmony Korine
#50. 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
#51. I left the University of Chicago's creative writing program for a tenure-track job at DePauw University in Indiana, then left DePauw in 2010 for Los Angeles.
Nic Pizzolatto
#52. But that isn't why. The why is that none of it matters. Not school, not cheerleading, not boyfriends or friends or parties or creative writing programs or ... " She waves her arms at the world. "It's all just time filler until we die.
Jennifer Niven
#53. I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.
Charles Frazier
#54. 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.
Kate Zambreno
#55. I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.
Michael Cadnum
#56. 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
#57. 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!
Douglas Adams
#58. I was never forced to write. At least, I was never forced or even encouraged to write fiction. Creative writing wasn't in the curriculum at my school when I was in sixth grade.
Rodman Philbrick
#59. The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.
Lynn Flewelling
#60. Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
A.S. Byatt
#61. 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.
Francesca Gregorini
#62. I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.
Anna Journey
#63. Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.
Steve Blank
#64. I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.
Zadie Smith
#65. 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.
Lucinda Williams
#66. 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.
Joan Larkin
#67. When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
Peter Coyote
#68. 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
#69. You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
Nelson Algren
#70. No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It's simply not worth it. This is not medical school.
Ann Patchett
#71. I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'
Neel Mukherjee
#72. 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.
Ian Rankin
#73. I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing.
Tom Drury
#74. I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.
Paula McLain
#75. I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
Justin Townes Earle
#76. When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#77. Telling stories has been a compulsion of mine since I could physically say, 'Once upon a time ... ' But in high school, I realized I could study creative writing in college and actually pursue it as a viable career.
Victoria Aveyard
#78. I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
Sarah Hall
#79. Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
#80. I love puppies, and I love animals in general. Besides that, I do martial arts: extreme martial arts. I also play real guitar and drums, and sing. And I'm taking some college classes, hoping to major in English and creative writing.
Cameron Monaghan
#81. My first semester, I got a D in creative writing.
Conrad Hall
#82. The best and only true history we have. Everyone interested in creative writing should know this book.
Tony Ardizzone
#83. 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.
Mohsin Hamid
#84. Glory, causes, careers, and love mean nothing on an empty stomach. Because of food, I lost my self-respect; because of food, I suffered the humiliation of a lowly cur; and because of food I took up creative writing, with a vengeance.
Mo Yan
#85. I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#86. 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.
Vikas Swarup
#87. For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.
F. Sionil Jose
#88. Favorite subject? I would have to say creative writing.
Bindi Irwin
#89. Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
Rachel Cusk
#90. 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.
Marilyn Hacker
#91. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer.
John Gardner
#93. 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.
Rachel Kushner
#94. I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop.
Phil Klay
#95. 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.
Etgar Keret
#96. 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.
Colleen Hoover
#97. A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.
Richard Hugo
#98. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
Stephen Koch
#99. 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.
Markus Zusak
#100. 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
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