Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

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

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

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 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.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

If I find out I have to write today and nothing else, that’s a perfect day. I know a lot of people who are great at it and make it look easy who are tortured and miserable people. Writing for me is perfect peace.

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

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

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.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

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 paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.