George Orwell Quotes

Good writing is like a windowpane.

I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.

I think the best advice I give is to try not to write. Try not to overwrite, try not to make it sound too good. Just use your own voice. Use your own style of putting it down.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

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

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

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

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

[Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will be understood.

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

When writing for the page, the focus is on the design - how the words appear on the page. I try to make it as direct and simple as possible.

I feel like when you just say what the truth is, you can't really comment more than that.

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful.

The best style is the style you don't notice.

Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

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