There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it.

[Wishing her mother had named her Beulah:] At least you did not sit on your beulah.

Isn't success ridiculously easy, once it begins to succeed? ... after the strain and sweat and pushing until the very groins of your being shrieked protest, something like momentum happened. It took your wits and your concentration and your continued willing sweat, of course, to keep it going, but the success of success had ball bearings.

Oh - oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

Some authors have what amounts to a metaphysical approach. They admit to inspiration. Sudden and unaccountable urgencies to writecatapult them out of sleep and bed. For myself, I have never awakened to jot down an idea that was acceptable the following morning.