“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.”
More from Madeleine L'Engle on Writing
“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
“A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”
“In reading we must become creators.”
“The author & the reader "know" each other: they meet on the bridge of words”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”