Writing Class Quotes

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus. ~ Susan Orlean

I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there. ~ Paula McLain

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something. ~ Leni Zumas

I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo. ~ Rachel Sklar

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...

Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! ~ Nick Hornby

Described as a "workaholic speed-writing freak" by fellow writers, a "creative writing class drill sergeant" by his writing 'padawans', Voinov is a self-confessed geek and has enlarged his days by 12 secret hours in return for the sacrifice of ten albino virgin pygmy hippos. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing class where we could talk about anything except for the drawing. No one could even mention it. ~ Lynda Barry

Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you. ~ Barack Obama

If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent who was at a conference. ~ Kimberly Willis Holt

Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people. ~ Peter Shaffer

All I'm saying is that there is a generation gap, and I think it revolves around this public/private thing. Our generation -- we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. I'ts the great tradition of realistic fiction, it's what novels are all about. the private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. No wonder I could never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric State. It's an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids...are living a film, not a novel. ~ David Lodge

I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year. ~ Jose Saramago

What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me. ~ Harold Bloom

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. ~ George Orwell

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. ~ Richard Hugo

I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago. ~ Amanda Hocking

Every decision I have made - from changing jobs, to changing partners, to changing homes - has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far... In the past several years I have learned, in short, to trust myself. Not to eradicate fear but to go on in spite of fear. Not to become insensitive to distinguished critics but to follow my own writer's instinct. My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best that I can and let judgment fall where it may. The difference between the woman who is writing this essay and the college girl sitting in her creative writing class in 1961 is mostly a matter of nerve and daring - the nerve to trust my own instincts and the daring to be a fool. No one ever found wisdom without being a fool. ~ Erica Jong

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi. ~ Beth Henley

I had various jobs, I taught a SAT class, I was a bartender, I had a day job at an office and was making short films. I got grants from NYSCA and NEA for an idea, which later became 'Huckabees,' about a guy in a Chinese restaurant who had microphones on every table and heard every personal conversation and would write perversely personal fortunes. ~ David O. Russell

After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Alimony is the curse of the writing class. ~ Norman Mailer

Because I work quite slowly, I have to keep myself interested over a long research and writing period. So I can't see myself writing about modern middle-class Londoners anytime soon. ~ Stef Penney

I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear. ~ Michael Pollan

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing. ~ Leni Zumas

The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even "realized" the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: "You're going to die. And you're going to die. And you're going to die." I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused. ~ Elif Batuman

Somewhere in university, I realized that I hadn't been to classes in months, and I'd get tired to the point of narcolepsy doing anything other than some form of performing, directing, writing, or acting. ~ William Shatner

His sophomore Creative Writing class was as silent as a room full of teenagers could be, only whispering and shuffling a little as they tried to complete their papers. This wasn't one of the "easy A" electives, and he usually got the kids who were serious about the idea of being better writers. Half of them just wanted to get better so they could improve their Pacific Rim hurt/comfort fanfic, but there was nothing wrong with that. Besides, one of them had let slip that a good portion of the class was posting on Archive of Our Own, and he'd spent a few nights with a beer in his hand, learning more about his students. He hadn't read the NC-17 pieces - there were professional limits - and yet he felt he respected them more as writers because he'd seen what they were capable of when they weren't being graded. ~ Seanan McGuire

I read, with a kind of hopeless envy, histories and legends of people of our craft who "do not write for money." It must be a pleasant experience to be able to cultivate so delicate a class of motives for the privilege of doing one's best to express one's thoughts to people who care for them. Personally, I have yet to breathe the ether of such a transcendent sphere. I am proud to say that I have always been a working woman, and always had to be ... ~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

You can't top that remark for hypocrisy or the setting for irony. It isn't the middle class who write $32,500 checks. Those who do expect something in return. They've been getting it. ~ Jack Kelly

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

There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life. ~ Jarvis Cocker

I don't know which is worse - to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don't think cheaply, then there at least won't be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you may not be able to write well. The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention. ~ Flannery O'Connor

In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of 'fit' and 'unfit.' Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists [sic], one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails. ~ Margaret Sanger

You've got to be a good reader. So whatever genre that you're interested in, read a lot of books about it and it's better than any kind of writing class you'll ever take. You will absorb techniques and then in a lot of cases you can just start writing using the style of the book or the author that you admire and then your own style will emerge out of that. Be a diligent reader and then try to write seriously, professionally and approach everything in writing in a professional way. ~ Homer Hickam

I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life. ~ Howard Shore

As soon as you opened your mouth and said the word woman, you were beaten down with the argument that you were betraying the class struggle. There are many poignant writings in which feminists first write pages about their class standpoint before getting to their actual issue. What was then known as class warfare is today called anti-racism. The threat of being accused of racism gave birth to false tolerance. ~ Alice Schwarzer

Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I've never seen such a miserable group of people in my life. They don't know anything about themselves ~ Sarah Schulman

It's very vulnerable, being an artist, telling the truth like that, like we're doing now. When you're living your life, you're so inside your head, you're swirling around in your own pain, that it's hard to see how obvious it is to the people around you. These songs I was writing felt coded and secret, but I suspect they weren't coded and secret at all. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

If the present White House leadership runs the gauntlet of common sense and the people's will for peace and challenges us by starting MX missile deployment, then the Soviet Union will respond by deploying a new intercontinental ballistic missile of the same class, with its characteristics in no way inferior to those of the MX. ~ Dmitriy Ustinov

By keeping most tax rates at present levels, Obama and the Democrats will claim that they have championed tax cuts for the middle class. ~ John Podhoretz

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote ... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic ... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did ~ John Fowles

I don't think age has much to do with writing. I think it's something that can certainly improve in time, but there's no age limit on how old you need to be to write well. ~ Sandy Hall

Grammar, you're the pickiest noun I know. ~ Buffy Andrews

The best parts about writing a show are [its] first, second and 10th anniversaries. Everything else is relative levels of hell. ~ Alan Menken

as a child
there was either
books
or
pain.
i chose books.

-how i became a writer ~ Nayyirah Waheed

I started to submit when I was twelve, and obviously at that time they weren't good enough, and I suppose in my heart of hearts I knew it. But you have to start sooner or later, you have to dig in. ~ Stephen King

And it [Fight Club novel] was written so general that my father thought I was writing about his father, and my boss thought I was writing about his boss. People really put themselves, you know, in the shoes of the narrator. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write. ~ Eduardo Galeano

I walk around and think about things. When I come across a thought that makes me laugh, I write it down. Then, at night, I say the thought to people through a microphone. I don't think about politics or pop culture very much, so those thoughts don't often make it to the microphone. ~ Demetri Martin

Outside sleep's open window, between the drops of rain, history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain. ~ Ani DiFranco

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something. ~ Geoff Dyer

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week. ~ Maeve Binchy

I wish to try my hand at a novel," he said. "Just scribbling, I assure you, but it strikes me as such a noble art, requiring none of the monetary resources of opera or drama, nor the erudition of poetry. Perchance a publisher could be found. I'd be satisfied by the printing of even a score of copies, if only to hold the bound work in my hands. It gives a unique satisfaction, I assume, the writing of a novel. ~ Kyle Muntz

In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. ~ Richard K. Morgan

I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue. ~ Charles Soule

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it). ~ Umberto Eco

We derive insightful perception by observing and studying, comparing and contrasting. Without investigating why we prefer the veil of life to the cloak of death and without considering how to create dangerously, live honorably, and die gloriously without remorse and regret, we risk dissipating what precious little shelf life our brittle humanity grants us. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades. ~ Meg Cabot

Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter - painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn't; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding - - ~ Charles Jackson

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing. ~ Matthew Weiner

these kind of features are strong indicators of a strong oral tradition, that the writing was more an aid of what people have already memorized, that you went to the text already knowing what it should say. ~ Keith E. Small

Barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3. ~ Helen Fielding

As soon as a thought darts, I write it down. ~ Thomas Hobbes

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.
There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before. ~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The first draft of anything is shit. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The more I go on in this career of making albums, writing songs and playing music, the more I think of each album as a movie. I really wanted to make a film, but making a film is much more expensive than making a record. ~ J. D. Souther

While the state may only satisfy our demands in some marginal fashion, there is no reason for us to advance marginal demands; and this does not mean we have to limit ourselves to maximum demands for immediate realization of FULL COMMUNISM. It means we recognize the actual demand from the working class and propose solutions that move us in the direction of communism. ~ Anonymous