The sentence was written by the novelist John Barth in “Writing: Can It Be Taught?” (New York Times Book Review, 16 June 1985) — not as a quotation but as his own one-line compression of Kay Boyle’s opinion (Quote Investigator ↗), inside an essay whose answer to its own title question was that writing emphatically can be taught (Louis Menand, The New Yorker ↗). Boyle’s own recorded words, from the previous summer, were different — she called writers’ conferences and creative writing programs things that “should be forbidden by law.” The specialist trace produces no Cormac McCarthy source at all: he appears in it once, inside a 1999 sentence saying something else entirely (Quote Investigator ↗).
“All Creative-Writing Programs Ought to be Abolished by Law” John Barth, “Writing: Can It Be Taught?,” New York Times Book Review, 16 June 1985, paraphrasing Kay Boyle. The words are Barth’s, not Boyle’s.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Kay Boyle. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
Where the wording actually comes from
The wording appears in
“Writing: Can It Be Taught?”
Written by
John Barth · New York Times Book Review, 16 June 1985, p. 1
Boyle’s own words
Leo Litwak interview · New York Times Book Review, 15 July 1984, p. 33
Cormac McCarthy
No documented source
Kay Boyle, late of San Francisco State, opined in these pages not long ago that all creative writing programs ought to be abolished by law.
Paraphrase, not quotation
Barth wrote that sentence with no quotation marks around it. It is his own compression of Kay Boyle’s view, not a transcription of her words. What Boyle herself had said, in the same Book Review section the previous summer, ran: “these endless devotees of writers’ conferences, creative writing programs, all of which I feel should be forbidden by law.” Barth is where “forbidden” becomes “abolished”; the quotation marks (Grimes, 1999) and the hyphen in “creative-writing” (Menand, 2009) were added after him (Quote Investigator ↗).
15 July 1984 — the interview Quote Investigator identifies as probably the basis for everything that follows. Talking to Leo Litwak in the New York Times Book Review, Kay Boyle refers in passing to “these endless devotees of writers’ conferences, creative writing programs, all of which I feel should be forbidden by law” (Quote Investigator ↗).
16 June 1985 — John Barth, on page one of the same Book Review section under the title “Writing: Can It Be Taught?”, compresses Boyle’s remark into the sentence everyone now quotes — unquoted (Quote Investigator ↗) — and inside an essay whose answer to its own title was yes (Louis Menand, The New Yorker ↗).
1999 — in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Hyperion), editor Tom Grimes puts Barth’s phrasing inside quotation marks and hands it to Boyle — in a sentence that opens with another novelist: “Cormac McCarthy said teaching creative writing is a scam, and Kay Boyle declared that ‘all creative writing programs ought to be abolished by law.’” (the book at the Internet Archive ↗)
8 June 2009 — Louis Menand repeats it as a Boyle quotation in The New Yorker: “Kay Boyle once published a piece arguing that ‘all creative-writing programs ought to be abolished by law.’ She taught creative writing for sixteen years at San Francisco State.” That is the version most readers now meet (The New Yorker ↗).
The exact wording first appeared in John Barth’s essay in the New York Times Book Review of 16 June 1985, and Kay Boyle’s own version in the same paper on 15 July 1984 — both decades past the 1931 line that separates public-domain American publications from protected ones, so neither is free to reuse. Quoting a sentence for comment and criticism, as this page does, is a different matter from reprinting the essays.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Three things go wrong with this quote
Almost every element of this quotation is off by one step: the punctuation, the name it sometimes travels under, and the opinion of the man who actually wrote the words.
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The quotation marksKay Boyle Paraphrase
Boyle is the documented credit, and the opinion really is hers — but the words are not. Barth set them down unquoted, as his own summary; the marks were added later, by Grimes in 1999 and by Louis Menand in The New Yorker in 2009, who writes that Boyle “once published a piece arguing” it. Her own documented phrasing was “should be forbidden by law,” not “ought to be abolished by law” (The New Yorker ↗).
✕
The other nameCormac McCarthy No source
No source has ever been produced, and the specialist investigation — filed under McCarthy’s name because of the confusion — traces the wording to John Barth and quotes nothing at all from McCarthy. He surfaces there once, in a single sentence from Tom Grimes’s 1999 Iowa anthology, where “Cormac McCarthy said teaching creative writing is a scam” runs straight into the quoted line (Quote Investigator ↗) — close enough, we think, for the two halves to fuse. That inference is ours; the investigation proposes no bridge.
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The sentimentJohn Barth Reported, not held
Barth wrote the sentence, but he was stating an opponent’s case. He had taught in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins for twenty-two years, and his 1985 essay’s answer to its own title question — can writing be taught? — was an emphatic yes (Louis Menand, The New Yorker ↗).
✓The opinion is Kay Boyle’s; the famous wording is John Barth’s, written in defence of the very programs the line is now used to attack; and Cormac McCarthy, whose name sometimes travels with it, has no documented part in it at all (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
Everyone in this chain taught creative writing
The line survives because it is a perfect weapon: an insider calling for the police. And that is exactly why it keeps changing hands — it lands hardest coming from whoever seems least likely to say it, so over four decades it has drifted from an aside in an interview, to an unquoted paraphrase, to a quotation — and, where the 1999 Grimes sentence is misread, to a bigger and more forbidding name.
The irony the drift has erased is that every person in the chain was a teacher of writing. Kay Boyle taught creative writing at San Francisco State from 1963 to 1979, and, by the NEH’s account ↗, customarily opened her courses by admonishing students never again to take another one. John Barth, who supplied the famous phrasing, spent twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and produced the sentence inside an essay defending them. The quote is a piece of family argument, now read as an outsider’s verdict.
The words were written by a man who ran a writing program, about a woman who ran another one.
What Kay Boyle actually said
The nearest thing to an original is the 1984 New York Times Book Review interview by Leo Litwak, in which Boyle is recalling a lecture by Nelson Algren and drops the opinion inside a dash: “And then he told the devotees — these endless devotees of writers’ conferences, creative writing programs, all of which I feel should be forbidden by law — that it was in his personal failure that Fitzgerald’s art succeeded.” It is a parenthesis in a sentence about F. Scott Fitzgerald, not a manifesto, and it says forbidden, not abolished.
Quote Investigator also read through Boyle’s published work from around 1985 hunting for the quoted form and did not find it. A 1986 Los Angeles Times interview has her going after repeat workshop students rather than the programs themselves: “Every time I teach one, I say, ‘Geez, never take another one.’” (Quote Investigator ↗)
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1930–2024 · American novelist · Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University
John Barth (27 May 1930 – 2 April 2024) was an American writer known for postmodern and metafictional fiction — The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968) — who shared the 1973 National Book Award for Fiction for Chimera (Wikipedia ↗). He also spent twenty-two years teaching in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, which is precisely why the sentence is so strange in his hands: the essay it comes from was a defence of creative-writing programs, and Barth set the line down only to summarise a position he was about to argue against (Louis Menand, The New Yorker ↗). He wrote the words; he did not hold the view.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented wording
John Barth, “Writing: Can It Be Taught?” New York Times Book Review, June 16, 1985, 1 — the appearance of this wording documented by Quote Investigator, written without quotation marks as Barth’s paraphrase of Kay Boyle. Boyle’s own wording: Leo Litwak, “Kay Boyle — Paris Wasn’t Like That,” New York Times Book Review, July 15, 1984, 33.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘All Creative-Writing Programs Ought to be Abolished by Law’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/all-creative-writing-programs-ought-to-be-abolished-by-law/