Creative Writing Quotes - Page 7

• 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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• A hero knows it takes hard work and a long time to get published; a fool thinks it should happen immediately, because he thinks heÕs a hero already.

  James Scott

  Hero, Hard Work, Writing

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• Here’s what I learned: First thing in the morning, before I have drowned myself in coffee, while I still have that sleepy brain I used to believe was useless — that is the best brain for creative writing. Words come pouring out easily while my head still feels as if it is full of ground fog, wrapped in flannel and gauze, and surrounded by a hive of humming, velvety sleep bees.

  Merrill Markoe

  Morning, Coffee, Believe

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• Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Writing, Creative, United States

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• When I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear.

  Janet Morris

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

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• 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.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Writing, Creative, Intuition

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works”, p.244, My Ebook Publishing House

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• All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

  E. B. White

  Communication, Writing, Escaping

  William Strunk Jr., E.B. White (1962). “the Elements of Style”

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

  Steve Blank

  Writing, Creative, Firsts

  "No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers – Business Plans versus Business Models". steveblank.com. April 08, 2010.

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• The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Creative, Facts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

  John Irving

  Writing, Creative, Maps

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• The only good grades I ever got in school before I was kicked out were for creative writing. I thought that fiction might be in my future but then my career took a different path once the Beatles showed me what a blast being in a band could be. Writing my memoir Late, Late at Night reminded me how much I love the craft. So I decided to give fiction a shot again.Magnificent Vibration is the result. I’m still not quite sure where it came from, but once I got going, it practically wrote itself. I’ve heard writers I admire speak of that phenomenon, so maybe I’m on the right track.

  Rick Springfield

  Writing, School, Night

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• As one of my creative writing professors once said, there are only seven plots. What makes those plots different is how you handle them, your voice, your style, and your way of thinking. That’s all. People can mimic your style, but they can never achieve your unique point of view.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Writing, Unique, Thinking

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• I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

  Langston Hughes

  Believe, Writing, Creative

  Langston Hughes (2015). “I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey”, p.122, Hill and Wang

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• I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

  Orson Scott Card

  Believe, Writing, Class

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• Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

  Mark Strand

  Writing, Creative, Program

  "In the Presence of America: A Conversation with Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, www.weber.edu. 1992.

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• To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative.

  Erskine Caldwell

  Writing, Creative, Subjects

  Erskine Caldwell (1988). “Conversations with Erskine Caldwell”, p.185, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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.

  Alain de Botton

  Teacher, Writing, Careers

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• 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.

  Joan Larkin

  Moving, Teaching, Writing

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

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• I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.

  Vikas Swarup

  Writing, Imagination, Creative

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• Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Teacher, Writing, Thinking

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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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• 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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• 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'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done traditionally in the academy...wherever that academy is...but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.

  Tod Goldberg

  Teaching, Writing, Broken

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories.

  Tod Goldberg

  Reading, Writing, Offering

  Source: therumpus.net

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