Virginia Woolf Quotes

I don't write with a complex style, I cannot.

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

With great writing, there is great clarity.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.

I always feel that I am writing for somebody who is bright but impatient. Someone who doesn't have unlimited time. That is my sense of the reader. So I have got to get to the point.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

There are writers who pour out words, concepts that sound really important but that basically say nothing. I always tried to be as concise as possible, all to try and reach everyone, but especially the simple people, those who needed to be reached more than anyone else.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

I'm not an angry person. When I write, the lawyer in me tries to make it as easy to read as possible.

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.

I still remember the first acronym I learned, BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. I still try to communicate that way. No reason to dance around getting to the point.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

[In the Royal Society, there] has been, a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.

How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood.