Alex Pareene Quotes

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

Remember that how you say something is as important as what you say.

I'm not one of those people who writes long soliloquies.

I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions.

I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that; otherwise, you end up preaching down. You need to listen not so much to the audience but to the story itself.

I love anything by Joan Didion. Incidentally, she was one of the local moms when I was growing up in Point Dume. She always reminded me a little bit of my mother, so I feel a great affinity. I love the precision of Didion's writing. There's a construction and a craftsmanship to her sentences that's imbued with so much emotion.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

I don't like writing with real people in mind.

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.

People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.

I am never going to write for the sake of writing.

You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

You have to keep your audience in your mind; if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!

I can't do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do - to do imagery. I'm not good at that. I just write from the heart.

To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that's not comfortable.

I'm not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.

I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.

Pick a co-founder that communicates in the same fashion that you do. If you are a screamer, then the only way you will ever listen to a conflicting point of view is to find someone who is passionate enough to yell back at you.

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

I sit a lot with my lyrics - I don't write just to write or put a line in just to have one. Everything has to mean something to me.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.