Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."
But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.
Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.
Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.
No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.