Quotes About Writing

This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: "If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.

Making these "predictions" of the future was relatively easy when the real author was living after the events he "predicted.

Our Bibles today have chapter and verse divisions. These are extremely helpful, of course, since without them it is very hard indeed to tell someone where to find a passage. But the authors did not write in chapters and verses. One problem with our having them is that they make us think that the next chapter (or even verse) is changing the subject.

the New Testament is arranged not according to when the books were written but according to genre, with the Gospels first, then the book of Acts, then the letters (of Paul and others), and then the book of Revelation.

Paul, and all the other authors of the New Testament, wrote in Greek).

The very first surviving account of Jesus's life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That's obviously a lot of time.

That's not how authors, ancient or modern, work. Authors write for readers in their own time and place.

When his predictions didn't come true, or even close to true, he continued writing books and giving lectures about how now the signs were coming to be fulfilled

A number of central issues are discussed in the writing: the nature of God, the character of the world, the person of Christ, the work of salvation he brought, and how to respond to it. Notably, its views stand diametrically opposed to those that eventually became dominant in Christianity and that have been handed down to Christians today.

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.

The expectation that the End Is Near has never done anyone much good, except perhaps the prophecy authors who have made fame and fortune writing about it.

similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.

The mason stirs. Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

But it was the first time I had ever really used the place I knew and the things I felt in a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhiliration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control.

Where do I get my ideas? The more pertinent question is…how do I make them stop?

The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There's someone who knows." Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.

The author of so many evils," he said.

Kill your darlings.

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggest that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

There'll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck doesn't he?

Se volete fare gli scrittori, ci sono due esercizi fondamentali: leggere molto e scrivere molto. Non conosco stratagemmi per aggirare queste realtà, non conosco scorciatoie.

Pop culture writing is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Literature is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances.