Quotes about Writing

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

The pen is mightier than the sword as long as it doesn't run out of ink.

And then we'll be emulating Socrates,* once we're able to write hymns of praise in prison.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, 'the absentminded professor-' They screamed at me, but I couldn't hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons.

To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time.

I do research, I read books. I write down everything that I intend to say and this may take several hours. Then when I am out there preaching, I do not carry notes.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn't matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

When I first started out writing the 'Darkness' books, there was, at least in my mind, a certain sort of rulebook we had to follow.

I've always had a maturity within my writing.