Ruskin Bond Quotes

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

I think a lot of writers are tempted to add complexity by over-complicating things, but always remember that most natural rules/laws are, at their core, simple. Start simple, and build from there, or you risk getting yourself and your readers tangled.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Here lies a plain and simple Jew who wrote in plain and simple prose.

I work real hard so the reader doesn't have to. I don't want them to have to look up words.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.

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.

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

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

I'm not over-enamored of complicated books, and wonder if it's more for the author's ego than anything else?

I don't even use italics or boldface; that's clutter, not clarity. Fancy fonts are fine for blogs, just as calligraphy is fine for diaries. But when you're writing for anyone other than yourself, you want to get as universal as possible.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

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

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.