Creative Writers Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Henry Miller

  Writing, Artist, America

  Henry Miller (1970). “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”, p.16, New Directions Publishing

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• 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.

  Willa Cather

  Lying, Writing, Character

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.81, U of Nebraska Press

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• 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.

  Lee Gutkind

  Hard Work, Reality, Creative

  Source: www.luxlotus.com

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• For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

  Hilary Mantel

  Creative, Kind, Historian

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

  Andre Gide

  Beautiful, Writing, Madness

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• 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.

  Mel Brooks

  Writing, Heart, Creative

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

  Dr. Seuss

  Life, Beautiful, Funny Inspirational

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• 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.

  Wilbur Smith

  Ideas, People, Creative

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

  Stephen King

  Writing, Caring, Tools

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”, p.174, Simon and Schuster

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• The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wisdom, Writing, Procrastination

  Statement on April 14, 1775. "Life of Samuel Johnson". Book by James Boswell. Volume II, 1791.

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

  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

  Music, Work, Inspiration

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

  Sidney Sheldon

  Writing, Pieces, Paper

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

  Sigmund Freud

  Children, Play, Creative

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

  Jules Renard

  Success, Writing, People

  Jules Renard, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Roget (2008). “The Journal of Jules Renard”, p.286, Tin House Books

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

  E. M. Forster

  Writing, Creativity, Creative

  Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) "Gide and George"

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• 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.

  Gayl Jones

  Believe, Creative, Political

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

  Willa Cather

  Lying, Character, Creative

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.81, U of Nebraska Press

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• 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?

  Sigmund Freud

  Children, Play, Creative

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• 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.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Children, Growing Up, Book

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “The Mulberry Tree”, p.49, Random House

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• 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.

  David Hare

  Creative, Different, Hue

  "New Again: David Hare". Interview with Kathleen Tynan, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 29, 2015.

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• 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.

  John Updike

  Self, Creative, Use

  "Writers on Themselves: Magic, Working Secrets" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. August 17, 1986.

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

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Doctors, Creative, Looks

  "For Egyptian Activist, A Dream Finally Realized". "All Things Considered" with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. February 12, 2011.

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

  Richard Hugo

  Creative, Finals, Looks

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

  Doris Lessing

  Giving Up, Creative Writing, Deals

  "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles". Interview with Herbert Mitgang, archive.nytimes.com. April 22, 1984.

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• The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes

  Julie Powell

  Writing, Sisterhood, Skulls

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