Quotes on Creative Writing

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.

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

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

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.

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.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

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

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.

Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.

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

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.