Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I am a stickler for damn good writing.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

Good writing is everything.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

You know if something is good because you remember the lines because it is written so well. The rhythm of the speech is spot on.

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.