Quotes on Creative Writers

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

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.

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

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

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

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

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

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.