Quotes About Authorship

I never put real people into my fiction - I can't see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.

Any writer who waits for inspiration to strike will never finish a book. Inspiration is all very well but it will never replace sheer dogged determination.

once that each of us is the author of our own lives? That we are responsible for what we are? For the deeds, both good and bad, that we do?

Paul, by the way, never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine.

What we think of as the twenty-seven books of "the" New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture.

An "orthonymous" (literally, "rightly named") writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it.

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.

what the book of Revelation actually does say and how it says it, matters surprisingly overlooked by many so-called experts on biblical prophecy.

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.

In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul's writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament.

We call these books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they are named after two of Jesus's earthly disciples, Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple, and two of the close companions of other apostles, Mark the secretary of Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul.

The decisions about which books should finally be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh.

It is because in John's Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus's words; they are John's words placed on Jesus's lips.

In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours.

but by a forger

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.

One of the interesting features of the book of Revelation is that unlike nearly all the other apocalypses it does not appear to be pseudonymous.

If a story is found in several of these independent traditions, then it is far more likely that this story goes back to the ultimate source of the tradition, the life of Jesus itself. This is called the criterion of independent attestation.

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

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

Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.

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.