John Scott Quotes

In writing, I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact.

I keep everything very simple. I like telling stories.

I want it to be easy to read. I'm not writing exotic literature.

My favourite writers are always great storytellers, like Bruce Springsteen; I adore Bruce Springsteen. I feel like he doesn't beat around the bush, and he doesn't overcomplicate things. He puts things into layman's terms and tells stories that anyone can understand.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

Anytime I write something that's trying to be too smart, it doesn't work.

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

Simple is the only way I can write.

Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just like this - so I don't want fancy descriptions getting in the way.

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

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

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

I like to write about stories and life experiences of me, the people around us, and just the things I see on the telly without overcomplicating things.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

The shorter and the plainer the better.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.

However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.