P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

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.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

I am baffled by good writing.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

I spend a lot of my time just looking at words and grammar and writing things down that I don't know.

I kind of always struggled writing in Malay, because Malay is such a beautiful language. And it gets really hard, you know, if you want to make it into a song. You have to make it sound beautiful, use the right words.