Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing is hard work.
A writer is always working.
Writing is thinking on paper.
Writing is a craft not an art.
You learn to write by writing.
Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
Thought is action in rehearsal.
A clear sentence is no accident.
Good writing is lean and confident.
Editors are licensed to be curious.
Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
Be grateful for every word you can cut.
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
Clutter is the disease of American writing.
Good writers are visible just behind their words.
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.
Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon "launder" became a dirty word.
If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.