Sholom Aleichem Quotes

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.

I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

I keep everything very simple. I like telling stories.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Anytime I write something that's trying to be too smart, it doesn't work.

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

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

I don't write with a complex style, I cannot.

I am not a great fan of serious, heavy writing. I prefer simple, short sentences, light on prose.

The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.

Plate glass... has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between. I hope that is what is happening when you read this book

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.

Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

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

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

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

I will decide who is a Jew!

When you catch an adjective, kill it.