Anthony Trollope Quotes

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

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.

I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

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

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I try to write every day until the book is done, but the exact process depends on the story and its structure. Sometimes, if the story is more linear, I write it from beginning to end.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.