Quotes About Writing

There is no resting place; you have to keeping trying to get it all down on the page. Silence threatens: as for Balzac's fictional Dante, writing is a constant skirmish with nothingness.

In testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefits. Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still. Overcoming these mild difficulties is a form of active learning, where students engage in higher-order thinking tasks rather than passively receiving knowledge conferred by others.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Only to read their letters, notes and poems, not to see them smiling … They distilled their wisdom in writing, not in prizes … For a kind of heavenly sense made clear, for an hour, deep inside us: That's why we read the wise.

I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I.

I feel pretty good about it so far, but it's been a little harder to write than I'd hoped.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

writing stories, scenes, and portraits is a very inductive process and will lead you to new insights and new points of view you couldn't reach by reasoning alone.

If you separate the writing process into two stages, you can exploit these opposing muscles one at a time: first be loose and accepting as you do fast early writing; then be critically toughminded as you revise what you have produced. What you'll discover is that these two skills used alternately don't undermine each other at all, they enhance each other.

Most people start shaping and revising what they have written once they get one pretty good idea. "Yes that's it, now I've figured out what I want to say." That's terrible. You shouldn't start revising till you have more good stuff than you can use. (And it won't take long to get it if you make your early writing into a free brainstorming session.) That way you'll have to be critical and throw away genuinely good stuff just to trim your piece down to the right length.

They were writing and reading these stories to understand their own relationship with God.

The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the postexilic period.

Rather, it was written to tell the Israelites that their God, and not the gods of the other nations, was the chaos tamer, and therefore, this God and this God alone was worthy of worship. And they made this point in ancient terms, using ancient ways of thinking.

The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written.

The point of all this is that the book of Exodus as we know it simply could not be as old as the thirteenth century BCE, and could not have been written by Moses.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible's true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.

The body of the ponderous scholarly exegesis that began to bather around Busch in his lifetime and picked up speed after his death is witness to the humorlessness of much writing about humor.

Have you ever been writing something when you just forgot where you were, and what time it was, and you kept diving down deeper into your words? No, it's more like diving down through your words--past them, and way further down into someplace out. In fact, it doesn't matter whether you're naked or not, since the next thing is, you leave your body totally behind and just go off into your mind. A whole other part of your mind.

Has it taught you to look at things different?' he asked. i thought, How does he know about all that? But i didn't have to ask him, because he just nodded toward his house. 'I bounce around them four walls a lot, Victor. I write some letters, I keep in touch with people. Putting your thoughts on paper, it makes you stop and notice stuff. Kind of slows you down.

Screenplays are structure, and that's all they are. The