Norman Mailer Quotes

It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

I'm a writer more than I am a talker.

Writing is a communication.

word thrower … phrase maker

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will be understood.

I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.

I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

Adjectives are the curse of America.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.