Adlai Stevenson I Quotes

I ain't no author, man... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

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 like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

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

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.