Norman Cousins Quotes

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

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

I'm just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I'm the sort of person who worries about the difference between "slim" and "slender."

Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.

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

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The use of the right word, the exact word, is the difference between a pencil with a sharp point and a thick crayon.

In good writing, words become one with things.

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

Good writing , like gold , combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.

Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

The single most important lesson of effective communication is this: Focus on clarity. Concentrate on precisions. Don’t worry about constructing beautiful sentences. Beauty comes from meaning, not language. Accuracy is the most effective style of all.

When you have the goods, you don't need to dress up what you're writing.

Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.

Aaron Sorkin very sticky about using precise language. It's in his contract: you have to use what he writes!