Rob Bignell's Blog, page 11
May 26, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Ana��s Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
We don���t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, of which I can only escape by writing.
��� You don���t write for yourself or for others. You write out of a deep inner necessity. If you are a writer, you have to write, just as you have to breathe, or if you���re a singer you have to sing.
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May 25, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Dylan Thomas
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone���s knowledge of himself and the world around him.
What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps��� so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
I like to think of poetry as statements made on the way to the grave.
If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.
Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.
Reading one���s own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet���s tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.
The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.
I make one image���though ���make��� is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be ���made��� emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess���let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.
Don���t be too harsh to these poems until they���re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
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May 24, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
You can���t use up creativity. The more you use the more you have.
I���ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ���Uh oh, they���re going to find out now. I���ve run a game on everybody and they���re going to find me out.���
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May 23, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author John Steinbeck
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
And now that you don���t have to be perfect, you can be good.
I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.
I don���t think there is a single sentence in this whole book (���East of Eden���) that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
I nearly always write ��� just as I nearly always breathe.
I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.
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May 22, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author J. K. Rowling
And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for a while is just bliss.
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives.
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
I don���t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.
I don���t read chick lit, fantasy or science fiction but I���ll give any book a chance if it���s lying there and I���ve got half an hour to kill.
I don���t think about who the audience is for my books.
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May 21, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author C.S. Lewis
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.���
I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it's thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.
Don���t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was terrible, describe it so that we���ll be terrified. Don���t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we���ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, Please will you do my job for me.
Instead of telling us a thing was ���terrible,��� describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was ���delightful���; make us say ���delightful��� when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, ���Please will you do my job for me.���
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ���More people died��� don't say ���Mortality rose.���
The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.
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May 20, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Jodi Picoult
The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that���s the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
You can always edit a bad page. You can���t edit a blank page.
���you can find threads of me in the characters, so that���s really what being a writer is, probably.
When you���re stuck, and sure you���ve written absolutely garbage, force yourself to finish and then decide to fix or scrap it ��� or you will never know if you can.
Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it���s all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don���t buy that. It���s a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don���t. Every day I sit down and write.
Many of my books come from what if questions that I can���t answer, things that I���m worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.
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May 19, 2025
Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer. ��� Jean Little
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May 18, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Samuel Taylor Coleridge
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?
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May 17, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Annie Dillard
Write as if you were dying.
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang.
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
��� (always) assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
We don���t know what���s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite?
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