Elmore Leonard Quotes

Punctuation, is? fun!

Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue... I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

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 once had a story editor ask me not to use the word 'placenta.' I wanted to say: 'Now tell me again how you got here?' Oh, right, an angel of God placed you into the bill of the stork.

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words-say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy-if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you're generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed.

Using adverbs is a mortal sin.

With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap

Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!