Elmore Leonard Quotes

The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

I am not a Hemingway aficionado.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.

I'm the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing.

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

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

I adore anything Michael Alexis writes.

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.