F. L. Lucas Quotes

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

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.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

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

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

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

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

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.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.