Quotes about Inspiration

We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

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.

One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

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.

Very few of us understand Honorable Bird, except to acknowledge that without his power and grace nothing would be written, painted, or composed at all. To say anything beyond this about the creative process is like pulling all the petals off a flower in order to analyze it, and ending up having destroyed the flower.

What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

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.

It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

You matter. You are. Be.

Life...is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

And joy, Grandfather would remind me, joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.