Laurence Sterne Quotes

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

Writing is this act of faith - a bit like driving in the fog: you can hardly see just in front of you. But you trust God's leading you and you just write into the space you can see ahead of you.

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

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.

It's that drama that drives authors, you know.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

Writing a book is not a small undertaking, but God placed it on my heart to trust Him with such a project.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

Faith exists when absolute confidence in that which we cannot see combines with action that is in absolute conformity to the will of our Heavenly Father. Without all three--first, absolute confidence; second, action; and third, absolute conformity--without these three all we have is a counterfeit, a weak and watered-down faith.

I don't claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, and He packs our life with surprises all the time.... Leave the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

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.

Put God first in everything you do ... Everything that I have is by the grace of God, understand that. It's a gift ... I didn't always stick with Him, but He stuck with me.

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.