Michael Winter Quotes

One tends to write beyond what's needed.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

I would feel weird if I wasn't able to be longwinded, or have information-overload on our songs.

I'm a prolific overanalyzer. And I can always use 15 words in place of three 3, no matter what.

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.

When I use the word 'buzz' in successive sentences, it's clearly time for me to stop writing.

My scripts are possibly too talkative.

After all, it is a common weakness of young authors to put too much into their papers.

PLEONASM, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.

Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

I've never been called a man of few words.

Emphasizing and rewarding length over quality results in worse writing and more reader abandonment.

As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

A gentleman that loves to hear himself talk, will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.

Writers talk too much.

Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.