Word Selection Quotes

Realize now the power that your words command if you simply choose them wisely.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

It's better to use a curse word than to hurt somebody else, I find.

It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

Let me try once more," Milo said in an effort to explain. "In other words--" "You mean you have other words?" cried the bird happily. "Well, by all means, use them. You're certainly not doing very well with the ones you have now.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

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

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

This is why it is sometimes hard for introverts to find words: we really hate to compromise, and words are always a compromise.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.

Every once in a while I'll say something...I dropped the F-bomb early on in my career. There was this lesbian couple and they looked super-hip. One of them looked at me and shook her head, like "Don't do that." I think she was doing it to say, "It doesn't work." She didn't say anything but it was this cautionary moment. I knew it didn't work. There are just so many other words to choose from.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

Choose each word as a precision tool. Consider how it sounds, not how it reads.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.