H. L. Mencken Quotes

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about.

I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

word thrower … phrase maker

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.

Nothing feels better than constructing a beautiful sentence.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.