Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Needs, Want

  Twitter post from May 01, 2016

• Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, World, Paint

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Artist, Way

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Book, Writing, Stories

• 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

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Form, Given

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from Apr 23, 2016

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Life, Beautiful, Children

  Twitter post from Apr 21, 2016

• If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Book, Writing

  Madeleine L'Engle (2017). “The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention”, p.123, Open Road Media

• I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Humility, Artist

  "A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals, Book 1)". Book by Madeleine L'Engle, 1971.

• When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Creativity, Color

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.84, Convergent Books

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Life And Love, Taken, Writing

  Madeleine L'Engle, Library of Congress (1984). “Dare to be Creative!: A Lecture Presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983”, Washington : Library of Congress

• The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Discipline, Effort

  Twitter post from Sep 14, 2016

• I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Believe, Book

  Madeleine L'Engle (2012). “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?”, p.987, Macmillan

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Truth, Believe, Writing

  Twitter post from Dec 29, 2010

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

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Book, Writing, Hands

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Book, Writing

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Mean, Up To You

  Madeleine L'Engle (2013). “The Wrinkle in Time Quintet”, p.87, Macmillan

• A book comes and says, 'Write me.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Book, Writing

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Writing, Lines

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Writing, Character

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.130, Open Road Media

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Writing, May

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.102, Convergent Books

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Teamwork, Jobs, Book

  "Please Welcome...Sharon Hinck". www.wherethemapends.com. October, 2007.

• To write for children at all is an act of faith.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Writing, Literature

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Jobs, Writing

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “The Irrational Season”, p.106, Open Road Media

• 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.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Children, Book, Writing

  Twitter post from Jun 11, 2012

• 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."

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Mother, Writing, Son

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