Creative Writing Quotes

Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one's mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

By writing much, one learns to write well.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

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

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

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.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.

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.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.

Becoming a writer means being creative enough to find the time and the place in your life for writing.

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell ... In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

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

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

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

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.

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.

An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

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.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

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.

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.