Roy Blount Jr. Quotes

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

People who think well, write well

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

Anything works, as long as you write it properly.

With great writing, there is great clarity.

Steve Martin is such an exquisite and precise writer. Everything is so clear; it's like a bell. He says what he means and says it so beautifully.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

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

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

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.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

Disorganizatio n is the enemy of good writing.

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.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

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

I think my writing has become "cleaner."