Rob Bignell's Blog, page 14
April 26, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Ray Bradbury
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Write a short story a week. It���s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
You don���t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
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!
April 25, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Susan Sontag
A writer���is someone who pays attention to the world.
The writer does not have to write. She must imagine that she must. A great book: no one is addressed, it counts as cultural surplus, it comes from the will.
The function of writing is to explode one���s subject ��� transform it into something else.
Writing means converting one���s liabilities (limitations) into advantages.
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
An art of writing (that is, hearing): find the right tone of voice, the right ennui.
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!
April 24, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Oscar Wilde
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they���ll kill you.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
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!
April 23, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Pearl S. Buck
I don���t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream ��� whatever that dream might be.
I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.
If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
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!
April 22, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Robert Benchley
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn���t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
The free-lance writer is one who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.
People who begin sentences with ���I may be old-fashioned but���" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong.
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!
April 21, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Anne Lamott
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It���s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can���t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.
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!
April 20, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author William Faulkner
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it���s the only way you can do anything really good.
If a story is in you, it has to come out.
Read, read, read. Read everything ������ ���trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. ��� Then write. If it���s good, you���ll find out. If it���s not, throw it out of the window.
Don���t ���be��� a writer. Be writing.
The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself��� alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
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!
April 19, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Lillian Hellman
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don���t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.
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!
April 18, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Joseph Joubert
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.
Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.
Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas.
Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes.
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!
April 17, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Phyllis A. Whitney
A good book isn���t written, it���s rewritten.
There���s only one good reason to be a writer ��� we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.
You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft ��� then you can add all the genius you like.
���As good as��� always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be ���as good as���; he (or she) must be ���better than.���
���Reading��� had always been my lifeline ��� an escape to that imaginary world where hurts were fictional and endings happy...
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!
