Ronald Fisher Quotes

One tends to write beyond what's needed.

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.

Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

Writers talk too much.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious.

At least when you're young you're also stupid.

Whenever I have talked to anyone at too great length, I am like a man who has drunk too much, and ashamed, doesn't know where to put himself.

People do too much. They say too much.

Maybe that is why young people make success. They don't know enough.

youth has everything - everything but experience and tolerance.

When you're seventeen years old, green and inexperienced, you're grateful for any guidance and direction you can get.

Continuous eloquence wearies.

But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

It is comparatively a faint and reflected beauty that is admired, not an essential and intrinsic one. It is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man. They will not boast; they will be frank and humble. Well, let them have the few poor comforts they can keep. Humility is still a very human virtue. They look back on life, and so see not into the future. The prospect of the young is forward and unbounded, mingling the future with the present.

There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself