Creative Writers Quotes

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.

You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.

A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature. . . . I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician -- not a "good" politician.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

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.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

If professional religious leaders can [no longer] instruct..., our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.

Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.

One must be an inventor to read well.

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.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

What politicians want and what creative writers want will always be profoundly different, because I'm afraid all politicians, of whatever hue, want propaganda, and writers want the truth, and they're not compatible.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

The creative writer is usually captive to his next book.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

The problem with reality TV is that creative writers are not involved; TV folks are, and some journalists who will only mine the surface of subjects. Hard work necessary for discovering and delineating the intimacies of the subjects they capture is mostly avoided.

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

all creative writers need a certain amount of time when they're creating something where nobody should criticize them at all - at all. Even if the criticism is valid or good, they should just shut up, and let that person create. Because at a certain point you have to make it your own - not the world's, but your own.

A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.