Quotes about Writing

But I know that writing on bags is something people do only out of anxiety and uncertainty. Neither defeat nor the greatest success is conducive to writing.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Gather your material carefully, and then allow God to "set your words on fire" for His glory.

They were writing and reading these stories to understand their own relationship with God.

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the postexilic period.

Rather, it was written to tell the Israelites that their God, and not the gods of the other nations, was the chaos tamer, and therefore, this God and this God alone was worthy of worship. And they made this point in ancient terms, using ancient ways of thinking.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible's true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.

And Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD. Early the next morning he got up and built an altar at the base of the mountain, along with twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel.

The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.