Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Hard writing makes easy reading.

The perfection of style consists in the use of the exact speech necessary to convey the sense in the fewest words consistent with perspicuity, at the same time having regard to appropriateness and harmony of expression. Its greater excellencies are directness, accuracy, appropriateness and perspicuity.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

Omit needless words.

I strive to be brief but I become obscure.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

Easy reading requires hard writing.

You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do: and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.

Vigorous writing is concise.