Rob Bignell's Blog, page 3

Great Writing Quotes by Author David Sedaris

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Writing gives you the illusion that you're in control. But it's just that: an illusion.

You need to be in the world and you need to be engaged with the world. It's my job to collect jokes. It's my job to collect startling images. And so when I'm out in the world, I'm at work. And I'm a professional.

You can't write unless you read.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't ��� I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere ��� but I have to find it.

I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.

I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.

Write relentlessly, until you find your voice. Then, use 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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Alejandro Zambra

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To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it.

Every story, every poem, every written piece is about belonging. There is a me, there is a we, there is an us, and we want to belong to it or we don't want to belong. You can read every story with this as its main focus.

You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.

...although we might want to tell other people's stories, we always end up telling our own.

...writing is a way of finding out about things I didn't know before I began writing.

Publishing my book is like giving it away. At first you start talking about it, but you are basically letting go. I won't say it's like giving birth because I haven't given birth. It's more like when your children leave home.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Leo Tolstoy

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All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.

I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Wis��awa Szymborska

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Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Robert Coover

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I would not, myself, say that fiction must anything. Ever.

In its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.

When you���re living with a mob of other people, it���s hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain���t YOU no more.

The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn���t imagine ourselves through a day without it���.We need myths to get by.

We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

...fiction, myth, these are necessary things.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Edwidge Danticat

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Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

There's no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.

Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway. 

���novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you���ve heard about long-haul narrative. They���re your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Somerset Maugham

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I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o���clock sharp.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn���t matter a damn how you write.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Clarice Lispector

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So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Dan Brown

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Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don't really care how many books I've sold.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees - boil vats and vats of raw sap - evaporate the water - and keep boiling until you've distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence.

Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.

���I will never turn in a book that I'm not happy with.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does. To create, one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind, to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swell that art emerges.

As a reader, I have often felt the magic of literature, that sudden internal shiver while reading a novel, that glorious shock of mutuality, a sense of wonder that a stranger���s words could make me feel less alone in the world.

Literature shows us who we are, takes us into history, tells us not just what happened but how it felt and teaches us, as an American Professor once put it, about things that are ���not googleable.��� Books shape our understanding of the world.

I do not deny the power of words to wound. Words can break the human spirit. Some of the deepest pain I have experienced in my life have come from words that somebody said or wrote, and some of the most beautiful gifts I have received have also been words.

I believe deeply in the principle of free expression, and I believe this particularly because I am a writer and a reader, and because literature is my great love and because I have been formed and inspired and consoled by books.

My first instinct, on learning that a book has been banned, is to seek it out and read 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!