Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean.
When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.
Good writing is really meaningful, and it's one of the - it's still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people's attention.
And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.
I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.
Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.
If you realize early what your influence is, you can have a better understanding of what you are writing about.
The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
With any piece of writing, you're hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does.
Even the revolutionary writer will err if he fails to grasp the enormous effectiveness of occasional understatement.
A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.
