Creative Writer Quotes

This is what it
means to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not make
up facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does not
make up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? ~ Sigmund Freud

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer? ~ Dean Koontz

If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you. ~ Tom Drury

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones. ~ Taiye Selasi

I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative. ~ B.J. Novak

I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature ... I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician
not a "good" politician. ~ Gayl Jones

There are no "great" subjects for the creative writer; there are only the singular details of a single human life. ~ Richard Selzer

A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry. ~ Molly Cochran

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. ~ John Updike

No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not. ~ Mel Brooks

The creative writer is usually captive to his next book. ~ Fannie Hurst

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously. ~ Sigmund Freud

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity. ~ George Orwell

Some mediocre ladies in influential positions are usually embarrassed by an unusual book and so prefer the old familiar stuff which doesn't embarrass them and also doesn't give the child one slight inkling of beauty and reality. This is most discouraging to a creative writer, like you, and also to a hardworking and devoted editor like me. I love most of my editor colleagues but I must confess that I get a little depressed and sad when some of their neat little items about a little girl in old Newburyport during the War of 1812 gets [sic] adopted by a Reading Circle. ~ Leonard S. Marcus

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser. ~ Nelson Algren

The creative writer is compulsively concrete ... His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions ... ~ Wallace Stegner

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Willa Cather

What's wrong with creative block? Might it not just be that periods
even extended ones
of productive hiatus are essential mechanisms of gestation designed to help us attain higher standards in our pursuit of creative excellence? ~ Alexi Murdoch

I've carved out a career for myself really as a writer. ~ Tori Amos

To be creative you must create a space for yourself where you can be undisturbed ... separate from everyday concerns. ~ John Cleese

I just feel really fortunate to build a career as a writer. ~ Pippa Middleton

Grammar to a writer is to a mountaineer a good pair of hiking boots or, more precisely, to a deep-sea diver an oxygen tank. ~ A.A. Patawaran

Van Houten, I'm a good person but a shitty writer. you're a shitty person but a good writer. ~ John Green

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand. ~ Michelle Huneven

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals. ~ Ida Tarbell

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn't the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills. ~ Philippa Perry

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority. ~ Rachel Cusk

Present-moment awareness creates a gap not only in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum. Nothing truly new and creative can come into this world except through that gap, that clear space of infinite possibility. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. [...] Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of---not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative. ~ Jonah Lehrer

Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more. ~ Wilkie Collins

Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose. ~ Laurie Alberts

You don't get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. ~ Austin Kleon

Something comes out of every voyage,' said the other man sharply. 'Out of every bloody fruitless endeavour. All the striving after the unknowable. The unattainable, the search for Athor, the creative force, rolled into a circle. You with your quest; I with my care-ridden Emperor; Sir Thomas, sitting before the fire, his bowels burning before him. We add something. If we didn't add something, there would be no object in it. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

As we become more aware of what it takes to move through the journey from where we are to where we are destined to be, the teaching stories that are within my story, our story, is a reminder to use your conscious and creative powers of imagination to choose which road(s) you will take. ~ Mozella Ademiluyi

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood. ~ Robert Morgan

I believe Photoshop is in some way the contemporary darkroom, the creative area that all photographers have available today. ~ Douglas Kirkland

Creative power is mightier than its possessor. ~ C. G. Jung

Working in the context of ultra-famous brands like Dior and Vuitton, creative spirits are always going to feel reined in. It's important that they are free to develop ideas. And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It's not a big investment. ~ Bernard Arnault

When I was a bad writer, I would consciously imitate other NPR writers who I thought were wonderful. I suppose that everyone's artistic practice is different. But I collaborate and sometimes don't agree at all with my collaborators' opinions. It forces you to understand why you don't agree with something: what's the fight you're picking. ~ Ira Glass

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence. ~ Tobias Wolff

As a publisher what you are trying to build is a long life for a book, to help it find its readers in many different ways, whether or not it made this list or got that review, etc. I'm sure some of that thinking has been useful to me as a writer as well. ~ Danielle Dutton

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader. ~ Jane Smiley

Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Aunt Lovey used to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed a writer's voice. 'Read,' she'd say, 'and if you have a writer's voice, one day it will shout out, 'I can do that too! ~ Lori Lansens

Writer's Block: making authors miserable since the Stone Age. ~ Max Hawthorne

The two-point rhythm of walking's stride clears the mind for thinking. (N.B.: Perhaps, after telling the spinal circuits to "take a walk," the forebrain shifts to automatic pilot, so to speak, freeing the neocortex to ponder important issues of the day.) Many philosophers were lifetime walkers, who found that bipedal rhythms facilitated creative contemplation and thought. In his short life, e.g., Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles--ten times the circumference of earth. ~ David B. Givens

It is certainly true that cooking is therapeutic, creative and all those other faintly creepy self-helpish words. I would love to tell you that learning to cook was part of my journey toward actualization. I would love to tell Oprah this. I would love to tell Oprah this while weeping. But I learned to cook for a much simpler reason: in the abject hope that people would spend time with me if I put good things in their mouth. It is, in other words (like practically everything else I do), a function of my desperation for emotional connection and acclaim. ~ Steve Almond

Don't be creative. Don't be stupid."
"That's what Machiavelli said. You guys really have a lot of faith in me, don't you?"
"Neither one of us wants to lose you. Just be careful, Billy. Careful is my middle name."
Black Hawk rolled his eyes. "You told me it was Henry. ~ Michael Scott

Unconditional lovingness, coupled with belieflessness, opens the door to unlimited creative genius. ~ Maximus Freeman

The Reticular Activating System The May 1957 issue of Scientific American magazine contains an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain. The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it's the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music's playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room. Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby. - Maxwell Maltz ~ David Allen

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Writers are people whose words speak louder than their actions. ~ Shon Mehta

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more. ~ A. E. Hotchner

If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason, I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content, I would have expected that writer to have done the same to me. ~ Michael Arrington

Written works do not produce fast reactions as pictures and sculptures and music do. it takes no effort to see or hear. but to read - to grasp what the writer has done - requires commitment. engagement. as is the case with most art, the relationship between the maker and the audience is remote in time and space. the writer is nowhere to be seen when the reader takes up the book, or even dead. but most often, books go unread ... thus the writer, knowing this as writers do, is even more alone ... yet writers write. and knowing what they know makes their isolation almost a sacrament. ~ Anneli Rufus

Whole new businesses will emerge around breakthrough products as revolutionary technologies accelerate capitalism's creative destruction of slower industries. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story. ~ John Dufresne

His writer's words poured over her like poetry, and she couldn't find a single wisecrack to put up between them. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I'm a writer. I was just diagnosed with PTSD. This unfortunate diagnosis, I assure you will not stop me. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

I know I am a writer because until I'm writing I don't know what I know. ~ Wayson Choy

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time. ~ Adam Schlesinger

I think the most important lesson I've learned about being a writer is that a real writer keeps writing. We keep moving forward. We don't sit around waiting for "the muse." It's a job like any other, trying to get the entire story on the page. It's about getting our bums in the seat, every day. ~ Susin Nielsen

[EM] Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other people's books he found examples of style which he wanted to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing. The Zen masters of archery - of whom, in those days, Christopher had never heard - start by teaching you the mental attitude with which you must pick up the bow. A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Because you happen to be a writer doesn't mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded. ~ Philip Roth