Top 1200 Creative Writing Quotes & Sayings

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.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

I like writing, and I enjoy it. It's painful. You can't get around the pain of writing. I'm still trying to balance on what I think is my creative habit. It varies, but I do know that I need to continue. It helps me with my acting, and the writing helps me be invested in a different way.

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.

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.

Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.

hough I was creative, I also liked math and science. At Knox College, I studied creative writing and earned a degree in chemistry, thinking I would attend medical school. Ultimately, I decided that a career in nursing would allow more time for pursuing other creative interests. While I worked as an RN, I wrote stories inspired by my patients, designed t-shirts, and made hand-painted sandals.

In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?

My creative process involves reading books and magazines, writing outside, and moving around a lot. I like to pace around when I'm writing songs.

I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I didn't originally intend on writing a book. I started writing during the day to feel like I was accomplishing something creative.

While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it.

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

I don't really have hobbies. I paint. I write. I direct videos. I take photos. I'm a creative person. A normal day for me is doing all of those things. Sometimes I stay up until 5 A.M. writing a song because I make music. It's the same with writing.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

Acting is a creative process, and directing and music. I think creative people - and I take myself as a creative person and it doesn't mean you have to be an actor, a musician, or a painter - but I think if you are in a creative profession or a creative business you do have a heightened awareness.

For the last few years, I've enjoyed writing my own stuff since studying creative writing at school, and as I've grown up, I've realised how much I enjoy escaping into a world that I've created myself. So I've kept that up as a hobby.

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

Till the time I found a creative outlet, I was trying to be extra creative at business, which would always put me in a situation of conflict with other stakeholders. The moment I started writing, my creative impulses were finally channelised.

I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don't necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It's not the best choice for creative writing.

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.

I'm a creative person and I use painting, acting, writing, writing songs, or whatever, as tools to just get a point across, in order to communicate a story or an emotion.

I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.

I feel that all girls like clothes and I'm more of a creative person. If it's writing the album or developing the makeup range, it's just about being creative. That for me is where I am happiest.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

I do a lot of writing in my capacity as the creative director for a marketing agency. These days, though, I'm trying to write a little bit most evenings just to keep the creative juices flowing.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.

I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'

When I was at UCLA, a professor there encouraged me to write, and so I looked into specializing in creative writing in the English Department. And through that, I started writing plays.

I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.

That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.

After finishing my undergraduate work at the University of Iowa, where I took creative writing classes taught by Writer's Workshop students, I applied to half a dozen MFA writing programs.

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 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.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

What keeps me motivated to create new music is the joy of songwriting. The joy of being creative. The joy of writing a poem or essay. Writing anything. I just love writing, whether it is music or words. I just didn't need to share it for the last 18 years. When you share it, it brings on other things, which is good.

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

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.

I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.

I like writing and I enjoy it. It's painful. You can't get around the pain of writing. I'm still trying to balance on what I think is my creative habit. It varies, but I do know that I need to continue. It helps me with my acting, and the writing helps me be invested in a different way.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

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.

I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

I want to be creative in as many different environments as possible, whether it's doing film scores, writing for TV ads or video games - all sorts of stuff, as long as it requires writing music.

I've always had a really great time being in movies and writing music when I get home. The more creative I am, the more it feeds into other creative aspects of my life.

I cling to the fantasy that I could have done something more creative. Like actually writing a script, or writing a book. But the awful truth is that I... probably can't!

To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.

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

If I'm writing and doing music celebrating the Creator, who is the most creative being in the world - I mean, when you look at nature and when you look at all of the beautiful created things - why should I be limited in expressing myself? He's creative, so why shouldn't my music be creative, too?

I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.

I've always been an all around creative person. Song writing and writing are great ways for me to express myself.

I was a very creative child. I played the saxophone and piano, and I was always writing poetry and stories, or drawing in my notebook. I just tried to express myself through as many creative outlets as possible. And in high school, I started to get really into photography and videography and would spend hours working on it.