Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.

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

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.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.

Nothing feels better than constructing a beautiful sentence.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

Does anybody learn writing, or do they just touch someone who lets them see the power of the deleted word?

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Writing for radio really focuses the mind, because you can't rely on thinking "Oh, just pull a funny face at the end of this sketch." You've got to try to work on the words.