Creative Writing Quotes - Page 8

• For me, being a good creative writing teacher is actually kind of being a good therapist. The line is very porous - you can also be a creepy guru/abusive therapist, too, so you have to be very careful. But it feels really important to me.

  Annie Baker

  Teacher, Writing, Creative

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Writing, School, College

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• 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.

  Toni Morrison

  Writing, School, College

  Source: theharvardadvocate.com

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• I try to be realistic with students. And say that there's a good chance that they're not going to get a creative writing teaching job, that there aren't enough jobs to go around and the university faculties are cutting back on staff and that they may have to get some other kind of work. None of them wants to hear that, but it is true and I think I'm a good example for them of somebody who took the other route.

  Ted Kooser

  Teaching, Writing, Cutting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For a while the creative writing community sort of sprung out of places like Iowa and Syracuse. The graduates sort of went out, and they would found creative writing departments in the little colleges where they went, and then some of those would found other ones. I mean every college has got a creative writing department, so where are the jobs coming from? There are not any jobs out there.

  Ted Kooser

  Writing, Mean, College

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

  Andrew Lam

  Writing, Years, San Francisco

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• Grading creative writing is always an ethical dilemma. But what you brought up about grading personal stories versus the research paper is of course a truly volatile issue in teaching memoir or the personal essay, because there's no pretense that the narrator is a character.

  Debra Monroe

  Teaching, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As I tell my intro creative writing students, after reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write.

  Matthew Healy

  Reading, Writing, Creative

  Source: blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu

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• When Robert Bly visited Interlochen Center for the Arts so many years ago, he spoke to the creative writing majors and said, "The eye reports to the brain, but the ear reports to the heart." Perhaps this is the thing that musicians can do that writers can't ever, quite, but it is what I aspire to, that sense/power of the auditory, and the belief that to hear more clearly is to see more clearly, and that to see more clearly is to feel more deeply.

  Jack Driscoll

  Art, Eye, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have ALWAYS wanted to write - I was the seven-year old entering local library poetry contests, and I recently found my eighth-grade yearbook when we moved, and I had listed "WRITER" as my future occupation. It's always been something I've been hungry to do, but I think the more practical side of me (encouraged by the more practical sides of my parents of course) shied away from pursuing a career in creative writing, in favor of something a little "safer" like law.

  Lee Kelly

  Writing, Yearbook, Thinking

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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• I know people who've passed every creative writing course under the sun and who are more analytically intelligent and far better-read than I, but who just can't write either fiction or drama. It's like any art-form. In order for talent to be developed, crafted, it's got to be there in the first place.

  Suhayl Saadi

  Art, Drama, Writing

  "A new literary form is born: an interview with Suhayl Saadi". Interview With Sophie Erskine, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• The ways in which a standardized language test induces storytelling, for example, is the opposite of creative writing; you have to learn a logical way to start a story, whereas in creative writing you may begin at the end or begin at the middle of the story.

  Alejandro Zambra

  Writing, Opposites, Creative

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier.

  Tod Goldberg

  Teaching, Writing, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

  Lucinda Williams

  Dad, Sleep, Cat

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I kind of came from the Townes Van Zandt school of throwing yourself off a cliff and then that's what you write about, and that rule number one of creative writing is you have to have conflict. But if you write about yourself mostly, then if you don't have conflict, then you create it. And the older I get, the more I realize that that's not a very smart way to do this. Not to say I'm the most self destructive person on earth, but it's easy to do.

  John Fullbright

  Smart, Writing, School

  Source: www.npr.org

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• The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

  Douglas Adams

  Book, Writing, Class

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• A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.

  Stephen Spender

  Inspiration, Writing, People

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• In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.

  Meg Cabot

  Writing, School, College

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• The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

  Toni Morrison

  School, Writing, College

  Interview With Chloe Brooks, theharvardadvocate.com. April 13, 2016.

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• No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

  Russell Lynes

  Art, Writing, Editing

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• A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.

  Richard Hugo

  Teaching, Writing, Class

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• If you want to write something completely unique, you will probably fail or at best write something without redeeming value. The mind works in certain patterns: the mind organizes facts in story form; it is your commonality with that body of human thought that makes a good book, not its estrangement from the common values that humans share.

  Janet Morris

  Book, Writing, Unique

  Interview with Michael A. Ventrella, michaelaventrella.com. May 15, 2012.

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• 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.

  Fred Savage

  Writing, School, Thinking

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

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• Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing. ...metaphors support lyrics like bones.

  Pat Pattison

  Writing, Support, Creative

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• By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.

  Ayn Rand

  Writing, Creative, Fundamentals

  Ayn Rand (2000). “The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers”, p.21, Penguin

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