Claude C. Hopkins Quotes

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

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.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

The shorter and the plainer the better.

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.

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

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

Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

I've been accused of being a minimalist writer. I don't like a lot of verbiage in there.

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.