Rob Bignell's Blog, page 6
July 15, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Samuel Johnson
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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
The greatest part of a writer���s time is spent in reading, in order to write.
Language is the dress of thought.
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure 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!
July 14, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Margaret Drabble
If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering ��� that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
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!
July 13, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Ben Franklin
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Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Write to Please Yourself. When You write to Please Others You end up Pleasing No one.
I know as well as thee that I am no poet born/It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn/If I make verses-'tis in spite/Of nature and my stars I write.
Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble.
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!
July 12, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author A.S. Byatt
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What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
Think of this ��� that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood....
���storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape.
I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
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!
July 11, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Robert Frost
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A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Enthusiasm must be forced through the prism of metaphor.
Every poem is the epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements.
For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn���t know I knew.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
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!
July 10, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Toni Morrison
If there���s a book you really want to read, but it hasn���t been written yet, then you must write it.
I tell my students there is such a thing as ���writer���s block, and they should respect it. You shouldn���t write through it. It���s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven���t got it right now.
A writer���s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. (said in 2015)
It is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together.
Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
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!
July 9, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Jean Cocteau
The poet doesn���t invent. He listens.
If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
When I write, I disturb.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand ��� We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
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!
July 8, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Charlotte Bront��
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I���m just going to write because I cannot help it.
Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles?���
In delineating male characters I labour under disadvantages: intuition and theory will not always adequately supply the place of observation and experience. When I write about women I am sure of my ground���
Far rather would I never publish more, than publish anything inferior to my first effort.
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!
July 7, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author J.R.R. Tolkien
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.
The story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.
I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name, and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.
A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.
If you really come down to any large story that interests people���holds the attention for a considerable time ... human stories are practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death.
The prime motive (of writing a novel) was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.
Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting.
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!
July 6, 2025
Great Writing Quotes by Author Agatha Christie
The best time for planning a book is while you���re doing the dishes.
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop...suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.
Nothing turns out quite in the way that you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.
I���ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
There always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate 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!
