succinct expression Quotes

Whatever advice you give, be brief.

There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on.

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.

A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.

If you can’t fit your argument on a bumper sticker, you’ve lost the debate.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

I'm obsessed with proverbs because, to me, flexing is being able to say the most with the least amount of words.

If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

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.

If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed the deeper they burn.

Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.

A parsimony of words prodigal of sense.

Sometimes the hardest part I think for actors on '24' is some of the jargon and getting the ideas and the thoughts and the information out quickly enough and succinctly enough and clearly enough.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.

Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, "Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?"

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly, and convincingly, just as a salesman must.

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.