Writing restraint Quotes

My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else.

You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can't, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel.

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.

No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.'

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.