Quotes About Writers

Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that's what writers do, they make contexts.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.

There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

The real problem is writers' refusal to take full and open responsibility for what they are saying. If a writer is willing to say, in effect, "I'm me, I'm saying this, and I'm saying it to you," his words will not just have more life in them, they will also be clearer and more coherent. The

When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In

The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition.

The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. And again, the same could be said of people of faith today.

they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam's Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts

Watching how the biblical writers looked at faith as trust rather than certainty helps us through our inevitable uh-oh moments from a different perspective. These moments are not proof that faith doesn't work, but only that a certain kind of faith doesn't work—one that needs correct thinking in order to survive (chapter 6).

These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time—and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up "explanations" to ease our stress.

We miss what the biblical writers were after if we think of belief and faith as "correct thinking" words. They are deep and hard words, more than we might have been led to expect. And they are beautiful words that move us deeper into the presence of God.

How do biblical writers talk about the past?

The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orally, perhaps (or probably) going back to what eyewitnesses had seen.

McClure was a very generous man who took an active interest in the work of his writers and truly wished to satisfy them. A formal, buttoned-down approach in the office was never his style, and he was well known for the generous salaries he paid (two thousand dollars per article, for Steffens)

language of the Bible is meant always to point us to a truth beyond the text, a meaning that transcends the particular and imperfectly understood context of the original writers, and our own prejudices and parochialisms that we bring to the text. Literalism is not part of the solution to this