Quotes About MFA

The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. It is a way to keep writing safe - to keep reading safe from writing.

Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on.

I got my MFA from AFI as a director in 2010. I've had time to make the shorts that I made previous to 'Hereditary' and to kind of build these movies in my head.

I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.

When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.

I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop.

After finishing my undergraduate work at the University of Iowa, where I took creative writing classes taught by Writer's Workshop students, I applied to half a dozen MFA writing programs.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out.

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I used the second year of my MFA program to write a young adult novel and began pursuing picture books as well. I loved the economy of this art form, choosing, with pristine attention, the exact right words to tell the exact right story.

I graduated from my Master of Fine Arts program for writing for children and young adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Of course, for a master's program, you have to do a ton of reading. I would get up, usually around 5:30, to do my reading; otherwise, I would fall behind.

You tweet more often than you write and this could be why you're getting your MFA from the New School and not from Columbia. Columbia rejected you: Rejection is a dish best served in a paper envelope because then at least you can tear it up or burn it. #notintoColumbia #lifegoeson

The adult fiction and writing for children portions of my MFA program were kept very separate, and there was a stigma around those 'kid people.'

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.

Creative Writing Programs, while claiming in all good faith to train professional writers, in reality train more teachers of Creative Writing. The only thing a Master of Fine Arts degree actually qualifies one to do is teach… Fine Arts. - from Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

MFA program at the University of Michigan when we met.

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.