Rob Bignell's Blog, page 4

Great Writing Quotes by Author Thomas Mann

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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist's inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

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 Amy Hempel

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I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it���s that they���re dog, and that���s what dogs do.

���if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

I know when a story is finished when there is not a single thing more I can think to do to it. And since I know at the start what the last line will be, I know when I've reached that point as logically as I can that it's finished. As for the rewriting - it's not foolproof, of course, but if you're honest about having thought of every possibility and you still come back to what you have, what more can you do?

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 Tom Bissell

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A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.

This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.

It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.

What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing - solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing - is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Alison Bechdel

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The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.

You can't live and write at the same time.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Adrienne Rich

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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.

We write from the marrow of our bones.

We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

���it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author E.L. Doctorow

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Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader ��� not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

You do have to learn about yourself while you're writing, and your characteristic ways of self-sabotage.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Dorothy Parker

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I hate writing, I love having written.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do for them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.

I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have the money.

To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn���t it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are ���cheque��� and ���enclosed.���

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Don't look at me in that tone of voice.

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Elias Canetti

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The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

���no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas ��� better to write down what refutes and weakens them!

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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Shirley Jackson

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In the country of the story the writer is king.

All you have to do ��� and watch this carefully, please ��� is keep writing.

Use all the tools at your disposal. The language is infinitely flexible, and your use of it should be completely deliberate.

Do not try to puzzle your reader unnecessarily; a puzzled reader is an antagonistic reader.

Remember, the reader is a very tough customer indeed, dragging his feet, easily irritated.

As much as possible free yourself from useless and clumsy statements about action.

A story is, after all, made up only of words.

The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were.

I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, 'Shirley, don't forget--no murder before chapter five.

I think that the popular notion of the writer as a person hiding away in a garret, unable to face reality, is probably perfectly true.

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!