Barbara Tuchman Quotes

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

I write fast, I write beautifully, I write convincingly.

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

Intelligence alone can't make a good writer and style alone can't make a good writer - that is, not a really important or significant writer - but the two things together make a really good writer.

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.

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'm very comfortable writing.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

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

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.

Easy reading requires hard writing.

In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Right now with blogs and the flood of internet access, a multitude of aspiring writers think they're ready for prime time. They're not. Be great. Read. Write. Bust your ass. Learn and find your voice. As hard as you think it is, it's a hundred times harder.

Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.

I think what's really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.