Tryon Edwards Quotes

Hyperbole engaged in consciously to achieve a desired effect can be, as we have noted, a useful rhetorical tool. Indeed, its use in this manner is sometimes called "exaggeration in the service of truth." However, there's much to be said for restraint of tongue and pen, and restraint refers not only to what we say but also to how we say it. It is possible, believe it or not, to be emphatic without indulging in overstatement; it is possible to be forceful without exaggerating.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.

I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.

It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they're driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they'd sound ludicrous!

Hyperbole is something I'd better avoid.

I live in a constant state of hyperbole.

Inflated descriptions by the pen or exaggerated illustrations by the pencil.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier.

The speaking in perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love.

Reality bears no relationship to the super-heated rhetoric.

Never a man to understate matters

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

When I say 'Crush your enemy', I don't literally mean it.

I'm prone to hyperbole.

Hyperbole is not easily dealt with. Usually, it collapses under its own weight.

It's true, I did write - but it's probably not as dramatic as it sounds.

It's amazing how much things can get exaggerated.

You know what's the greatest part of anything ever in the history of everything? Exaggeration. No, wait; it's correcting yourself. No, better yet, it's making lists.

A practitioner in panegyric, or, to speak more plainly, a professor of the art of puffing.

You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.