Alexandra Petri Quotes

I've always liked simplicity.

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.

I always go back to how people behave. If you watch how people actually behave in a situation, it's very simple and honest and contained. You don't need to use as much expression, as much feeling. Some characters will boil over, and that's another thing, but a lot of times I think you can just do very, very little.

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.

To say more, is to say less.

It does not require many words to speak the truth.

I've always thought that less was a lot more.

I don't make big grand gestures, generally.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow.

I usually go with the 'less is more' approach.

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

Simple goes a long way.

I always think less is more.

Somewhere between this kind of cruising freedom, and this understated moment where all these little things intertwine to create a bigger sound. You don't want one thing to be bright, or too prevalent.

The best style is the style you don't notice.

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

The highest Beauty should be plain set.

I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

Acknowledge the elegance of simplicity.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

I feel there’s no need to overstate.