Rob Bignell's Blog, page 12
May 16, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Nick Hornby
Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...
All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
I read the f*** out of every book I can get my hands on.
Please stop patronizing those who are reading a book ��� ���The Da Vinci Code,��� maybe ��� because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us know what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others.
The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. ���Good��� books can be pretty awful sometimes.
Books are, let���s face it, better than everything else.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 15, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Mary Oliver
Instructions for living a life./Pay attention./Be astonished./Tell about it.
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject.
If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers ��� has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
���the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.
Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 14, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Albert Camus
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 13, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Catherine Drinker Bowen
Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.
The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.
In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret���s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 400+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 80+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 12, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author William H. Gass
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid. The word itself has another color.
Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.
It���s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 11, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Isabel Allende
Writing is a calling, not a choice.
Write what should not be forgotten.
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.
A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 10, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Arthur Plotnik
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what���s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Empowerment comes from precision, precision, precision; from language that harpoons the exact meaning, the nuance, for the intended audience.
The Web is cool, but the library is magic. Where else can the spirit of generations of writers stir your soul?
So many writers talk about libraries setting them on their magical paths, it's almost a groaner. But we know it's true. Wander through the stacks and you can feel the dreams, the unique worlds bubbling within each volume. The magic enters you as if by osmosis. On the Web, you may feel clever, lucky and driven to download--but rarely inspired to dream and to write.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 9, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Virginia Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Every secret of a writer���s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Fiction is like a spider���s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different. She has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 8, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Truman Capote
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it���s about, but the inner music the words make.
You can���t blame a writer for what the characters say.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
I prefer to underwrite, Simple, clear as a country creek.
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
May 7, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Cornelia Funke
All writers are lunatics!
Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.
Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.
A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.
A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.
Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.
The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.
Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!
