Amy Hempel Quotes

I write very tightly, and my big fear is boring people. I want them to read quickly, stopped in their tracks. I resist indulging myself.

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

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.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

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.

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you you have omitted every word that he can spare.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

Vigorous writing is concise.

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

People who want to express themselves effectively can learn a lot from the hard-won concision of the copywriter.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

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

You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.

As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.

Easy writing's curst hard reading.