Quotes about Writing

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

Someday he would write his memoirs, when his adventures had arranged themselves into a suitably attractive package.

In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind — that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that's constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality — its inexpressibility.

But I know that writing on bags is something people do only out of anxiety and uncertainty. Neither defeat nor the greatest success is conducive to writing.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Gather your material carefully, and then allow God to "set your words on fire" for His glory.

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

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

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.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

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.