Rob Bignell's Blog, page 5

Great Writing Quotes by Author Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Don���t classify me, read me. I���m a writer, not a genre.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherazade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest inventions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

I don���t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public, I���m looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

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 Sylvia Plath

[image error]
���everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

��� let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. 

I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. 

Poetry is a tyrannical discipline.

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 Anton Chekhov

[image error]

Don���t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being ��� not a slave's ��� coursing through his veins.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.

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 Donna Tartt

With my novels I start out by hand, scratching things out and underlining things in different colors and then when my handwritten pages get too messy, often because I've cut the paper up with scissors to move sentences and paragraphs around, I go to the computer and type things in ��� printing out different colors of paper for different drafts.

I like to work in quiet rooms. City noises don't bother me, but I can't stand overhearing a television.

Things don't seem real to me unless I write them down, which is partly why I carry a notebook everywhere.

Writing, for me, is almost another way of reading, except one level deeper. Almost as soon as I began to read ��� and I read very early ��� I began to write. 

���it's a writer's job to dive deep. And I've been under a long time.

A novel is an invention, an entertainment and an illusion. How do you talk about an illusion without destroying it?

We authors don't want you to look at us. We want you to look at what we made.

I write big books, but part of what I experience at my desk, what I do every day, is think and write about little 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 George Bernard Shaw

[image error]
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

Write your Sad times in Sand,/Write your Good times in Stone.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.

I do not know what I think until I write it.

I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.

The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable in all ages....

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.

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 Anita Brookner

[image error]
You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

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 Elmore Leonard

[image error]
Never open a book with weather.

Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.

Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.

Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said������he admonished gravely.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."

Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

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 Penelope Lively

[image error]

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

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 John Osborne

[image error]
Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Writing. I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.

Writers don't need love; all they require is money.

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 Iris Murdoch

[image error]

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.

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!