Edward Abbey Quotes

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.

As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.

In good writing, words become one with things.

The most important thing is to have something important to say and finding the means to say it.

You could be the World's greatest orator and if you don't say anything while orating, they are going to walk out on you after a while.

Nor use too swelling, or ill-sounded words . . . .

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.

Whate'er is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

Whatever is clearly expressed is well wrote.

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.

People who think well, write well

I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words.

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.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

You don't have to say everything to say something.

Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy, but it can easily cause confusion and obscurity and must be used with skill.

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

As a flower that is lovely and beautiful, but is scentless, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who practices it not.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

The single most important lesson of effective communication is this: Focus on clarity. Concentrate on precisions. Don’t worry about constructing beautiful sentences. Beauty comes from meaning, not language. Accuracy is the most effective style of all.

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.