Blaise Pascal Quotes

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

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

Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, "Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?"

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

I enjoyed writing for someone else's voice, but I wasn't very good at it.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

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.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean.

I always feel that I am writing for somebody who is bright but impatient. Someone who doesn't have unlimited time. That is my sense of the reader. So I have got to get to the point.

I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started.

I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.

Anyone can make an article longer; the skill is keeping it tight and lean.

It's fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. It's a very good exercise for me. And I think it's important to try to do different things - change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, I'd just be repeating myself, which wouldn't be good for me or fair to my readers.

Writing is hard - writing is the hardest.