Joseph Pulitzer Quotes

It's gonna be short if it's news; put it at the top. Style's not an issue, just make it news.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

A pin has as much head as some authors and a good deal more point.

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

What most readers do not realize is that it takes a particular genius to write funny, to satirize.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you've probably chosen the wrong something.

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.

But the shortest works are always the best.

It's hard to force creativity and humor.

If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

Everyone can write jokes and makes things clever.

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.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

My films are comical films. They are made to laugh at. They are comical - and scientifically correct.

Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet, works like a bookkeeper, and writes like a journalist.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

I write my columns pretty carefully.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.