Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Writing
-
I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am."
→ -
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
→ -
My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go. That’s what happens when you write stories. You listen and you say ‘a ha,’ and you write it down. A lot of it is not planned, not conscious; it happens while you’re doing it. You know more about it after you’re done.
→ -
During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.
→ -
You learn to write by doing it.
→ -
If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.
→ -
If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.
→ -
You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
→ -
Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.
→ -
In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet…But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants…You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
→ -
Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit
→ -
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.
→ -
I know writers who write only when inspiration comes. How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it? He would be lousy.
→ -
To write for children at all is an act of faith.
→ -
We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.
→ -
Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
→ -
The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
→ -
It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.
→ -
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
→ -
The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
→ -
You have to write the book that wants to be written.
→ -
A book comes and says, 'Write me.
→ -
If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.
→ -
Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
→ -
No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.
→ -
When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
→ -
If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.
→ -
Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.
→ -
When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.
→ -
I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.
→
Related Authors
-
Susan Cooper Author -
E. L. Konigsburg Writer -
Scott O'Dell Author -
Louisa May Alcott Novelist -
Rebecca Stead Writer -
George MacDonald Author -
Lloyd Alexander Author -
Katherine Paterson Author -
Kate DiCamillo Writer -
Pythagoras Philosopher -
Luci Shaw Poet -
Judy Blume Film writer -
C. S. Lewis Novelist -
Jean Craighead George Writer -
Jerry Spinelli Writer -
Lois Lowry Writer -
Ava DuVernay Filmmaker -
Elizabeth George Speare Writer -
Ursula K. Le Guin Author -
Gary Paulsen Writer