Creative Writing Quotes - Page 6

• 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

  New York, Writing, Editors

  "Rachel Kushner: 'I know what it feels like to crash a motorcycle at 140mph'". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. June 8, 2013.

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• 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

  Teacher, Book, Writing

  Source: estellabooks.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Lonely, Writing, Class

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• 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

  Art, Writing, School

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Believe, Writing, Creative

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

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• 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

  Writing, Creative, Obsession

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• I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.

  Miroslav Penkov

  Writing, Long, Creative

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

  Orson Scott Card

  Writing, Editing, Space

  Orson Scott Card (1996). “Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker”, p.33, Macmillan

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• 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

  Teacher, Writing, College

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

  Lorrie Moore

  Girlfriend, Writing, School

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• When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.66, Penguin

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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• Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

  A. S. Byatt

  Writing, Creative, Sublime

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• Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

  William Wordsworth

  Writing, Artist, Taste

  Letter to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807

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• A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Book, Writing, Reviews

  "The Complete Neurotic's Notebook". Book by Mignon McLaughlin, 1981.

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• The best style is the style you don't notice.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Style

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• In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, School, Prose And Poetry

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• 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

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

  "Rachel Cusk: in praise of the creative writing course" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. January 18, 2013.

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• Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

  Truman Capote

  Music, Writing, Law

  1974 Interview in Paris Review, Summer.

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• Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

  William Ralph Inge

  Art, Writing, Half

  Victorian Age (Rede Lecture delivered at Cambridge, 1922) p. 49

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• The secret truth of 'Celebrity Apprentice' is that it isn't very hard... 'Celebrity Apprentice' is easy like junior high is easy. All the arithmetic, the creative writing and the history are super simple, but like junior high, you do that easy work surrounded by people who are full-tilt, hormone-raging bug nutty.

  Penn Jillette

  Writing, Simple, People

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Writing, Men

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 6 Apr. 1775)

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• Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

  Eli Roth

  Writing, Self, Creative

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• A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

  Tom Bissell

  Writing, Wish, Doe

  "Truth in Oxiana". Article by Tom Bissell, www.worldhum.com. February 15, 2006.

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