Quotes about Writing

If I were living near you, I should try to make you understand that it might perhaps be more practical for you to paint with me than to write, and that you might be able to express your feelings more easily that way. In any case I can do something personally about your painting, but I am not in the writing profession.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.

I'm the author of several books, including children's books.

Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

When I was a 12-year-old middle-schooler in Richmond, Virginia, my local newspaper published an op-ed that I wrote all by myself.

Writing for television is completely different from movie scriptwriting. A movie is all about the director's vision, but television is a writer's medium.

When he was taken this last time, he was preaching on these words, viz.:Dost thou believe the Son of God?  And this imprisonment continued six years, and when this was over, another short affliction, which was an imprisonment of half a year, fell to his share.  During these confinements he wrote the following books, viz.: Of Prayer by the Spirit: The Holy City's Resurrection: Grace Abounding: Pilgrim's Progress, the first part.