Read moreRespect your reader. The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn’t worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.
—Jeff Goldfield
Read more. . . novelists . . . have, on average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdales’s department store. our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anyone can do it. All it takes is time.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 128
Read moreGood writing occurs because a writer passionately desires to say something. . . .
Students do not need more abstract advice about how to write.
They need somehow to have their feelings kindled.—X.J. Kennedy
Read moreI once stayed in a hotel, next door to a well-known writer.
He never talked about writing.
Each night I heard his typewriter,
hour after hour,
past midnight.
Everyone else in the hotel was asleep.
The sound of that machine reminds me, still,
that what writers do is write.—Richard Bach
Read moreIf there is a secret about writing,
I haven’t found it yet.
All I know is to sit down,
clear your mind,
hang in.—Mary McGrory
Read moreWriting is most of all an exercise in determination,
first to get the job done,
second to get the job done right.—Tom Clancy
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