Janet Fitch Quotes

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

With great writing, there is great clarity.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.

I am baffled by good writing.

Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

My favorite writers have been those who've said things well.

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.