Josh Billings Quotes

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

I labor to be brief, and manage to be obscure.

Love is probably the strongest emotion that you can feel. It's very natural - and I wouldn't want to say easy - but natural and comfortable to write about, and there's so many different forms of it, millions of layers - you could write forever about it.

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

I think it's OK that everyone's not real heavy and wordy and heady.

Every word you add dilutes the sentence.

I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.

The plainest case in many words entangling.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.

Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

Peoples lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. . . . What I wanted [to write down] was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.

Some authors write nonsense in a clear style, and others sense in an obscure one; some can reason without being able to persuade, others can persuade without being able to reason; some dive so deep that they descend into darkness, and others soar so high that they give us no light; and some, in a vain attempt to be cutting and dry, give us only that which is cut and dried. We should labor, therefore, to treat with ease of things that are difficult; with familiarity, of things that are novel; and with perspicuity, of things that are profound.

James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.

Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?

And then, 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, if I read the book again today, I'd find 100 other things that I missed last time. It's a constantly changing book.

the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.

There are things that don't deserve to be said briefly.