Rob Bignell's Blog, page 2

Great Writing Quotes by Author Allen Ginsberg

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To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

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Great Writing Quotes by Author Patricia Highsmith

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The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

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Great Writing Quotes by Author Jack Kerouac

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One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.

Keep it kickwriting at all costs, too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy���

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.

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Great Writing Quotes by Author Ruth Rendell

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I get a lot of letters from people. They say, ���I want to be a writer. What should I do?��� I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

To say that Agatha Christie���s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do.

I can't exist without books.

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Great Writing Quotes by Author F. Scott Fitzgerald

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You don���t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created ��� nothing.

Writers aren���t people exactly. Or, if they���re any good, they���re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Character is plot, plot is character.

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Great Writing Quotes by Author Hilary Mantel

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Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.

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 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author John Irving

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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don���t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind ��� making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. They���re going someplace.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

Half my life is an act of revision.

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 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Annie Proulx

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You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language.

I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes and the lack of direct human discourse.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

I would rather be dead than not read.

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 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Richard Matheson

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If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction....Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person.

When I'm writing, especially when I'm writing in first person, I don't think about the characterization, or how they are going to express themselves, I just express my own approach to these things. I think most writers can never divorce themselves from their private lives and personas; they are the ones that are writing. And the more they remove themselves from their own persona, the more, perhaps, mechanical the work becomes.

I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I've inspired a few people one way or another.

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 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Shannon Hale

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I���m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I���m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

... If we don't tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won't believe it.

The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it's a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that's too hard for me. I'm telling a story I'm not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I'm forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I'll have written something that is better than I am.

Many times I have learned that, you never judge a book by its cover. Like people, it is the inside that counts.

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 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!