“I only ask myself whether you might not and could not do what I have so often done: begin with a certain audacity to write (quite without reflection whether or not what you write is new or good, etc.) without hesitating until you are finished so that you have on paper, a corpus of, let us say, fifteen or twenty chapters, out of which then the remainder could crystallize and which could then be always worked over.”
36-year-old Karl Barth to his good friend 34-year-old pastor Eduard Thurneysen on February 16, 1923.
Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925 (Translated by James D. Smart), Richmond: John Knox Press, 1964, p. 132.
