Top 100 Quotes About Writing Class
#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
#3. The first time I took a fiction writing class was sophomore year. And I just found myself taking that extremely seriously, in a way that I didn't take anything else seriously. So I guess that was the start of it.
John Brandon
#4. I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.
Amanda Hocking
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.
Anthony Marra
#8. For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.
Alan Lightman
#9. Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
Jerry Pournelle
#10. A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.
Richard Hugo
#11. The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
Beth Henley
#12. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.
Flannery O'Connor
#13. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
Harold Bloom
#14. I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
Zoe Kazan
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.
Rachel Sklar
#19. I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.
Scott Adams
#20. I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.
Susan Orlean
#21. If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent who was at a conference.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#22. When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.
David Guterson
#23. Every morning like a scholar at his first class I prepare a blank mind for the day to write upon.
Bruce Lee
#24. There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.
Benjamin Booker
#26. One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.
Bell Hooks
#27. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#28. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.
Barack Obama
#29. My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.
Hannah More
#30. I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.
Howard Shore
#31. I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors.
James Thayer
#32. My students - all adults - bring a lot of writing skill to the first class, and they and I get better as the class progresses.
James Thayer
#33. 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
#34. It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.
Colum McCann
#35. I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
Joan Collins
#36. Grace Kelly writes great songs, sings beautifully, is a world class saxophonist, and is going to be a big big star
Huey Lewis
#37. Somewhere in university, I realized that I hadn't been to classes in months, and I'd get tired to the point of narcolepsy doing anything other than some form of performing, directing, writing, or acting.
William Shatner
#38. I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have - quite literally - never been made before.
Cate Marvin
#39. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#40. Writers searching for their voice: Whatever you're afraid to say, whatever burns inside you, say it with conviction. You don't need a class for that.
Gregor Collins
#41. Memorizing the writer's handbook doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a specialist, and it puts you to a class with people who were given the same training. You all share the same view from the same room.
Keith Buckley
#42. You can't top that remark for hypocrisy or the setting for irony. It isn't the middle class who write $32,500 checks. Those who do expect something in return. They've been getting it.
Jack Kelly
#43. My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
Arundhati Roy
#44. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#45. If you just want to be a writer, I don't care, for pitching, for writing dialogue, you should take an improvisation class. It's super important.
Thomas Lennon
#46. For all of my class projects, I somehow turned it into a commercial parody or put on plays. My whole thing was seeing things from a big picture, from beginning to middle to end: making a costume, doing voices, writing a script, making it all happen.
Noel Wells
#47. In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them.
Pat Conroy
#48. Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.
Derek Raymond
#49. Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
Peter Shaffer
#50. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body.
Annie Dillard
#51. Sinclair Lewis was asked one time to give a talk to class of students about writing. When he got there he asked the class, Do you people want to be writers?and they all said yes. Then Lewis said, Why the hell aren't you at home writing?
Tom T. Hall
#52. There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
Erica Jong
#53. I was always writing. I was writing in high school because it was a really competitive school for class clowns; I used to have to write all of my snaps and my disses the night before and then act like I was making it up the next day.
John Leguizamo
#54. Earning money is not the sole objective of life or education. A community of any quality should have a whole range of skills and interests. They should paint, write, perform, visit art galleries and enjoy world-class concerts. Only then will they form a vibrant, rounded, interesting community.
Goh Chok Tong
#55. Exercise and writing are so therapeutic to me. I try to write every day and I make it a huge priority to find time to work out, even if that means taking a spin class at 7am before work.
Sadie Calvano
#56. I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.
Gia Coppola
#57. It ratified a theory of mine that great writing could sneak up on you, master of a thousand disguises: prodigal kinsman, messenger boy, class clown, commander of artillery, altar boy, lace maker, exiled king, peacemaker, or moon goddess.
Pat Conroy
#58. I got so tired of hearing those proverbs when I was a child. Now I use them all the time. Sometimes they are the best way to say what needs to be said. I teach them to my students. I have a collection of proverbs for class discussion and writing assignments.
Marva Collins
#59. Like other women writers of my class, I am expected to tame my talent to suit the comfort of my family.
Kamala Suraiyya Das
#60. I wasn't a class clown, I just found at an early age that I was able to make people laugh. So I mostly wrote funny stuff instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.
Alan Zweibel
#61. And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).
Joanna Russ
#62. But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don't have to be very smart.
Beth Henley
#63. At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert ... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages.
Heather Hart
#64. Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.
Hugh Mackay
#65. While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
#66. It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!
Jane Yolen
#67. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level ... A writer is someone who writes.
Pat Schneider
#68. Writing fiction isn't about lying through your teeth, but more like, fibbing with a little class.
Anthony Mays
#69. When I was at school I got lines for dropping a big squelchy, loud fart. My teacher, who was a priest, made me write 'I must not fart in class' 100 times. I left that school shortly afterwards.
Brian McFadden
#70. 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
#71. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
#72. For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.
Valerie Miner
#73. There is a much higher probability that a first-class scholar should commit an error than that an author who usually writes nonsense should have one good idea.
Otto E. Neugebauer
#74. I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.
Michael Pollan
#75. The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.
Mary Blakely
#76. It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
Virginia Woolf
#77. I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
Thom Gunn
#78. A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.
Philip Zaleski
#79. I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.
Jose Saramago
#80. 'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.
Lynda Barry
#81. It's a way of clearing the palate. Kids come into the classroom with all this other stuff in their hands. If they write it down for 10 minutes they become much more available for whatever it is we want to do in the class.
Joan Countryman
#82. Then he spoke of James Joyce. He told about Joyce's family, his religion, his education, his writing. He spoke of a book called Dubliners and a story in the book titled "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." Regardless of race, regardless of class, that story was universal, he said.
Ernest J. Gaines
#83. Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
Aravind Adiga
#84. Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that 'writer's block' is a high-priority subject.
Mary Oliver
#85. When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.
Paul Fussell
#86. A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
Mao Tse-tung
#87. Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Leslie Jamison
#88. One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!
Randa Abdel-Fattah
#89. And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is now it's really easy to get scripts and stuff but back then, you know, oftentimes you'd buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know what happened in the scene.
Quentin Tarantino
#90. There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life.
Jarvis Cocker
#91. I have, as may be apparent, not much respect for editors as a class.
Piers Anthony
#92. I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
Gore Vidal
#93. I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#94. In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.
Leni Zumas
#95. Sometimes I'm writing for magazines on assignment, but the university has to be patient with me. I mean, during the ten-week periods that I have a class, I'm there every Thursday night or whatever it is, but sometimes that's all I'm there, because I'm somewhere else the rest of the time.
Pam Houston
#96. There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
George Orwell
#97. I didn't like school. I was pretty much daydreaming all the time. I would be in the back of the class writing down random stories and stuff that would have nothing to do with school. I only lasted two years in high school before I moved out to L.A.
Charlie McDermott
#98. I don't think I write differently when I'm writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.
Aaron Sorkin
#99. Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
Matt De La Pena
#100. No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.
Carol Burnett
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