Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.