T. S. Eliot Quotes

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

Because I write very simply, but inside the simplicity, there's a lot of subtlety. That's what I'm proud of.

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

When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

People don't read me and say, 'Oh, it's so clean and elegant.'

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.

It's a hard thing to examine and difficult to speak for other writers, but when I look at my own writing there is often too much reticence. And that's a flaw I have as a person as well. I'm too reticent. I'm non-confrontational to a fault. And I'm risk-averse, which probably shows in my sentences. The aversion to long lines, the tendency to strip things back and be spare. My writing is an act of erasure that's tied up with my personality. I can easily produce a ninety thousand word chunk of writing and then cut back and back until I've only got ten thousand words. Or nothing.

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.

It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.

There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.