Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Words should be only the clothes, carefully custom-made to fit the thought.
There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Don't gobblefunk around with words.
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.
Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has come to its last degree of perfection, the word blossoms.
An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.
I try to be as clear as I can be.
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.
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.
A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.
Words must be weighed, not counted.
He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.
True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.
Better to say something simply instead of giving people a bunch of vague metaphors to mull over.
Neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the insignificancy of their expressions to be inquired into.
I've never walked out of a room and had a disagreement as to what was said.
