Quotes about Writing

A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me, Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all? Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts. But I base my life on this belief.

We must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.

One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal.

If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it? I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I

My heart believed even when my mind faltered. I listened to my heart and I wrote A Wrinkle in Time as an affirmation that there was indeed light in the darkness with which I was surrounded. I wrote it for God.

All of Madeleine's writing, fiction and nonfiction, was an example of how all narrative is fiction, and all fiction can be true.

You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.

You cannot write without looking behind you; like Lot's wife. And in doing so you turn yourself and them into blocks of salt.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Never trust a man who writes more than he reads.