Lewis Carroll Quotes

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

You become a great writer by writing.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery, and I knew that the roots of imagery were the senses - and that if my readers could feel, taste and see what I was talking about, I would be able to tell them a story.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

word thrower … phrase maker

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons, or Celts, Can't seem just to say anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

Clichés are what good writing is all about. Because our lives are basically clichés.