Janet Fitch Quotes

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

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

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

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

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

Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.

I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.

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.

The best thing to do is to write about what you know, and if you write about what you know you can always pull those nice little tidbits that hook people, that shows that you know about this world and can bring people into a world that they may not know nothing about.

I just write what I think is good and keep it at a thousand words.