Marco Arment Quotes

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by 500 readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the 500, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

It's hard to build community around mediocre and mundane writing.

Don’t be afraid to discard work you know isn’t up to standard. Don’t save junk, just because it took you a long time to write it.

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

I know everyone says attention spans are shorter now, and if you can't get them in the first 20 seconds, you lost them. But I honestly believe if you give someone something worth slowing down to really pay attention to, they will.

The content has to be good; medium doesn't matter to me.

Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.

For me, whatever you write about should be worthy of your attention, worthy of your gifts. That's very important.

I've always thought, since the beginning of my career, that it was better to take your time and write some good stuff and then go in and not be pushed or forced into just crankin' stuff out, whether it was great or not.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

I think the thing that interests most actors these days is the strength and the quality of the writing. I think that's the main thing.

You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Things which any idiot could write usually have the quality of having been written by an idiot.

There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet].