"One can get the false impression that stories are a necessary stepping stone to publication.  MFA programs tend to perpetuate this belief, with most fiction workshops focused on the short story form.  But if your goal is to publish a novel, you should write a novel."

"I've come to feel that creative writing programs are havens for people who like to read."

"In America, we place the most importance on athletics in schools.  And then academics.  The arts get dismissed.  But everything you wear, everything you sit on, any building you're in, any piece of tech you use—that was someone's creation.  That was someone's epiphany.  Every tangible thing came from the mind of an artist."

"Arts education in public school is as essential as sports and math.  It's where we learn how to be people in collaboration with other people."

"The downside to institutionalizing creative writing involves institutional bad faith: for the sake of enrollments, you may be encouraging people with little or no talent.  My impression is that physicists don't encourage people who can't do math, just for the sake of enrollments."

"It was especially severe as a student in my overly competitive MFA program at the University of Iowa.  We students were pitted against each other and competed for praise, merit scholarships, and teaching jobs.  Most workshops, I'd leave in tears."

"I've also been at writers' summer workshops where really the model is setting one young writer against another.  I find that appalling.  Writing is not the WWE."

"Untalented writers may feel cheated and lied-to if they can't get published, if they don't have good lives as writers.  Which is why you have to tell everybody at the outset that no creative writing program can guarantee a career, or publications, or anything except for some close readings and guidance."

"I went to ... a great theater school.  And despite a lot of success, I decided I wanted to write instead of interpret."

"Instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked."

"An idea I was exposed to in art school: it's adamant that you enjoy the process more than the end product.  And that rule applies to all the arts, because we're fickle people."

"The practice of writing is a kind of self-instruction that no number of writing workshops can teach you.  You have to learn how to do it yourself.  The writing makes you a writer, it builds your discipline, enhances your talent, and draws froth the reserves of your character."

"The teaching of poetry has almost disappeared from the curricula of many English departments, and the AWP conferences have become a refuge for people who want to talk about poetry."

"Our social moorings aren't the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon."

[The student writer] only vaguely knows that successful writers have overcome the difficulties which seem almost insuperable to him; he believes that accepted authors have some magic, or at the very lowest, some trade secret, which, if he is alert and attentive, he may surprise.  He suspects, further, that the teacher who offers his services knows that magic, and may drop a word about it which will prove an ['Open, Says Me'] to him.  In the hope of hearing it, or surprising it, he will sit doggedly through a series of instructions in story types and plot forming and technical problems which have no relation to his own dilemma.  He will buy or borrow every book with 'fiction' in the title; he will read any symposium by authors in which they tell their methods of work.  In almost every case, he will be disappointed.

"AWP conferences are filled with would-be writers, but they're also filled with readers who love reading and want to talk about what they've read and what has mattered to them."

"Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being created on this day."

"When you're in art school, you're thrown into all of these vicious critiques.  But the point is to teach you that people's opinions can either have value or you can say, 'Fuck 'em!' and do what you do.  Someone will always think it's a piece of shit, so who cares what they think?  Just do what's important to you, hold yourself to the fire, make sure you're taking it seriously, and do the best you can.  That's enough."

"We need a new sociology of literary studies, and we need it right now."

"Stick with it.  Do your thing.  I dropped out at 16, I never went to art school, and I taught myself everything I know."

"I think that not going to art school was beneficial because that allowed me to find my own style.  When you study art, you become influenced by it.  And there's already so much we see on the internet that influences us as well."

"Even if you go to school and work a lot of internships, you can only really make your way through experience and the process of trial and error.  You have to come up with your own method of doing things if you want to do something truly unique."

"There's no 'correct path' to becoming a real artist. You might think you'll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it's all bullshit, and it's all in your head. You're an artist when you say you are. And you're a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected."