Writers to Read Quotes

“Imagination, as Napoleon once remarked, rules the world. One of our great problems is that we have relegated imagination to various artsy ghettos, there to let it play. But imagination, including—especially including—artistic imagination, has to be understood as a practical science. It must govern everything, and if it is detached from the praxis of life and then uprooted, it goes off to the art museums to die. For”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“The central point of the food is not what you are eating but rather who you are eating it with—but don't mistake the point here. That does not make the taste of the food, or the care that goes into its preparation, irrelevant. Far from it. A good sauce accents the taste of the food, and good cooking accents the taste of the fellowship. Capon knows that the real point of food is companionship—a word that comes from the Latin word for bread, panis. We treat the bread as important because the companion is important. And we should treat our food with exuberance because we want to adorn the food of communion.”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“Our inability to identify rotten fruit on the branches means that we are especially unable to identify a problem at the root.”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“This is why stories like this, with great evils in them, are necessary for children to read. Kids just got here—they are still figuring things out, and stories are one of the central realities that can help them. Chesterton says somewhere that stories about dragons and knights do not teach children to fear dragons. They had dragons under the bed already. They had the fear already. The stories actually teach children that dragons can be killed. And”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“Sensory experience should not be draped on top of the story as sort of a last-minute decoration. Done right, it is woven into the fabric of the story, and as this happens, the reader is woven in, right alongside the description. In giving advice to writers, E. L. Doctorow once said that good writing should communicate more than the mere fact that it is raining. The reader should feel rained on. A”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“The trick is to state what we know in a recognizable fashion but in a way that is slightly off, in a way that arrests us.”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl the fatherhood of God lies behind everything. This apparent chaotic world is not chaotic at all; if we step back and take it all in with the right perspective, we see that it is an intricately designed carnival ride. There is a fatherly purpose in it: it turns out that we thought we were being born into a world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but what was happening is that our Father was taking us to a particularly spectacular fair with some really gnarly rides. In”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

“with”
― Douglas Wilson, Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf