creative writing

Quotes & Thinkers in creative writing

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🇺🇸Edmund White

Literature

1940–2025

"Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire."

"The kitchen was the United States; the living room was Mexico…One side was struggling with all her might to make me an American boy, and the other side, with all of his might, was trying to keep me a Mexican boy."

"Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough."

99 quotes

🇺🇸Jonathan Safran Foer

Literature

b. 1977

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future."

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."

"I think fiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you learned and nonfiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you found or maybe even what you can’t run away from…"

"Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight."

"Mortality smelled muddy and wet and I reeked of it."

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."

"So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way."

5 quotes

🇺🇸Michael Schmidt (poet)

Literature

b. 1947

"Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it."

"Because oftentimes I’m the first or the only – so I cannot be the last."

"In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life."

2 quotes

🇺🇸John Edward Williams

Literature

1922–1994

"He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned."

"The thing is that underneath we are all humans…Everyone has people they love and people they want to protect, everyone has things they are afraid of or that cause them pain."

"'As a general rule you shouldn't expect too much from people darling,' and then I kiss her on the cheek."

"But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture."

15 quotes

🇺🇸Michael Greenberg (writer)

"No matter how bad you want a person, if your hearts are in two different places, you’ll have to pass and move on."

"When you move into a new place, it does involve a refashioning of the self. We derive our sense of identity at least partly in relation to the landscape around us, in which we’ve grown up..…"

"Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you."

"I’ve tried hard…I don’t know … my experience of my own dad and my own ex-husband possibly has some effect. I will remedy this. It is very unfair. I have tried harder, but I just can’t quite get there yet."

"I’m an old-fashioned copper–I don’t believe in breaking the laws of thermodynamics."

"Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one."

"I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!"