Writing Workshop Quotes

#1. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

#2. The only work that will ultimately bring any good to any of us is the work of contributing to the healing of the world.

Marianne Williamson

#3. I don't believe in miracles.

Sam Simon

#4. I almost drowned in a hot tub at a writing workshop once after I had some drinks without accounting for how the high elevation would impact my tolerance.

Tim Pratt

#5. If your workshop praises a poem, don't think everyone is too nice to tell you how terrible it really is. (If it is that kind of workshop, you should get out of it as soon as possible - honest feedback is the sign that people respect your writing and take it seriously.)

Kim Addonizio

#6. 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

#7. From my writer's workshop, Know when it's time to put everything you've got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it!

Heather Burch

#8. People are always going to need physicality; they're going to want to meet other people even more. I've got faith in the physical angle. People have their needs. They won't forget about them.

Bjork

#9. My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

Chuck Palahniuk

#10. 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

#11. Revenge is sweeter than life itself. So think fools.

Juvenal

#12. I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.

Eleanor Catton

#13. 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

#14. I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

Dennis Lehane

#15. Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It's also a powerful motivator.

Yogi Berra

#16. As a drummer, you can't fake the instrument. A trumpet, you could be blowing air; a person who plays the trumpet could still say, "Oh, those aren't the right hand motions." On drums, you have to actually hit them. You can't fake it.

Miles Teller

#17. The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

Sandra Cisneros

#18. There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

Marilyn Hacker

#19. Democracy is liberty - a liberty which does not infringe on the liberty nor encroach on the rights of others; a liberty which maintains strict discipline, and makes law its guarantee and the basis of its exercise. This alone is true liberty; this alone can produce true democracy.

Chiang Kai-shek

#20. For it is in this way that our adversaries, the bishops and the pope, talk with us in our day, while they pretend a desire for concord, and seek to bring about doctrinal harmony.

Martin Luther

#21. I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

Justin Cronin

#22. The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.

Sandra Cisneros

#23. 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

#24. Everything I do is for a reason. And I don't know what that reason is. Everything I do is for a reason, and I know none of them. Everything makes sense, and the sense is hidden from me.

Joseph Fink

#25. I've been very fortunate at having good titles but I just think in terms of titles. I'm doing a workshop now where people write books and they come and I name their books for them. I'm good with titles.

Larry Winget

#26. You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

Tobias Wolff

#27. It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

Michelle Richmond

#28. I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Tobias Wolff

#29. I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.

Kate Thompson

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. I swear,if she were a cat she'd be hissing.

Carrie Jones

#33. I grabbed his shirt, stopping him. He looked down at me mildly confused. I hesitated, and then smiled nervously. "Stay with me. Just for a little while. I don't want to be alone." I hated to admit that I was scared, but I was. I felt safe with him, and I didn't want to lose that feeling. He

Ella Price

#34. 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

#35. Some of their best songs don't have bridges and choruses. So that made me think I should trust my instincts. My songs were okay, I figured. I didn't need to change anything.

Lucinda Williams

#36. A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

Rachel Cusk

#37. I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

Juan Felipe Herrera

#38. I don't go online when I'm writing - that's the devil's workshop - but in general, I'm on there as much as any other global citizen.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#39. I'm a total ho for any writing workshop, any technique from anyone.

Travis Morrison

#40. (T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.

Jincy Willett

#41. What, then, are some of the shifts that have happened in our understanding of the composing process that make a focus on digital writing in the writing workshop that much more compelling?

Troy Hicks