Carl Hiaasen Quotes

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

With great writing, there is great clarity.

When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

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

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

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

What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

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.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.

No matter what you write, it's a matter of putting words in a certain order so that the reader will be interested in what you're writing.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.