Rob Bignell's Blog, page 7

Great Writing Quotes by Author James Patterson

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I never give anyone writing advice.

I���m always pretending that I���m sitting across from somebody. I���m telling them a story, and I don���t want them to get up until it���s finished.

A lot of times, if you're a fiction writer, you just make sh*t up.

I write in a very simple way. I don't have to. I know the rules���I could write more complex sentences if I wanted to. But I choose not to, and I think it's a valid approach.

People think free books are great, but it's a problem when publishers want to give away writing.

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 Alice Walker

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Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn���t matter. I���m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn���t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone life, just really being present to a lot of life.

It���s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important ... and to feel that you���re being published by people who really don���t get it and/or don���t really care.

Part of writing is not so much that you���re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and time set aside���as if you were going to have someone come to tea.

Writing is not different from life���you want variety, you want refreshment, and you want balance.

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 Virginia Woolf

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Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. 

For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

��� we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction���so we are told.

��� would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen has not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors?

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in the drawing room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop���everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for the ages or only for hours, nobody can say. 

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 Philip Larkin

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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn���t true!

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

��� I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything ��� these are sort of ���ideal��� poems that one feels ought to be written, but don���t because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A ���real��� poem is a pleasure to write.

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 Sylvia Plath

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Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.

And by the way, 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. 

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don���t love me, love my writing and love me for my writing.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, with an informed and intelligent 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!

Great Writing Quotes by Author Don Marquis

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If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that���s read by persons who move their lips when they���re reading to themselves.

Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

I never think at all when I write/nobody can do two things at the same time/and do them both well

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 Willa Cather

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If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Isn���t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

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 Alan Wilson Watts

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Stop aspiring and start writing. If you���re writing, you���re a writer.

Write like you���re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there���s no chance for a pardon.

Write like you���re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you���ve got just one last thing to say, like you���re a bird flying over us and you can see everything���

���please, for God���s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.

Write like you have a message from the king. Or don���t. Who knows, maybe you���re one of the lucky ones who doesn���t have to.

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 Edith Wharton

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A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author���s political views.

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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 McKee

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If you can���t play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you���re condemned to hum the same old tune.

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.

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!