Writers on Writing
ResearchWhat is research but a blind date with knowledge?
— Anonymous
Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.
— Hannah Arendt
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
— Celia Green
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
— Zora Neale Hurston
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man [or woman] will turn over half a library to write one book.
— Samuel Johnson
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
— Rudyard Kipling
I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing. . . .
I read in order to find out what I need to know: to illuminate the riddle.
— Cynthia Ozick
Scholarship is polite argument.
— Philip Rieff
The beginning of research is curiosity, its essence is discernment, and its goal truth and justice.
—Isaac H. Satanov
Back to list of topics.
Revision
Grab a pen and put down some words — your name even — and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way.
— Jacques Barzun
Good writing is essentially rewriting.
— Roald Dahl
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
— Bernard De Voto
Some poets actually say they don’t revise, don’t believe in revising. They say their originality suffers. I don’t see that at all. The words that come first are anybody’s, a froth of phrases, like the first words from a medium’s mouth. You have to make them your own.
— James Merrill
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. . . . But I’m one of the world’s great rewriters.
— James Michener
I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
— Vladimir Nabokov
The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
— Dorothy Parker
I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few
elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.
— Susan Sontag
When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Blot out, correct, insert, refine
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when invention fails,
To scratch your head, and bite your nails.
— Jonathan Swift
I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.
— Leo Tolstoy
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
— John Updike
Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.
— Evelyn Waugh
The best writing is rewriting.
— E. B. White
The word processor is God’s gift, or at least science’s gift, to the tinkerers, the refiners, and the neatness freaks. For me it was obviously the perfect new toy. I began playing on page 1 — editing, cutting, and revising — and have been on a rewriting high ever since.
— William Zinsser
Back to list of topics.
Sentence Style
A sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought — what we have to think with, and what we have to think in.
— Wendell Berry
No one should ever have to read a sentence twice because of the way it is put together.
— Wilson Follett
It helps to read the sentence aloud.
— Harry Kemelman
The demands I make on a sentence are the same demands I would make on a line of poetry.
— Cynthia Ozick
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.
— William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White
A sentence should read as if its author, had he [or she] held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
— Henry David Thoreau
Back to list of topics.
Style
A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.
—Aristotle
Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.
— Noel Coward
It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
— T. S. Eliot
A fluent writer always seems more talented than he [or she] is. To write well, one needs a natural facility and an acquired difficulty.
— Joubert
I once said his prose is dipped in chicken fat.
— Oscar Levant, referring to David Susskind
Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.
— G. C. Lichtenberg
He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
— Abraham Lincoln
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
— W. Somerset Maugham
The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.
— Schopenhauer
I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular; that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.
— William Shenstone
Avoid theatrical flourishes — the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good writing," and therefore must be struck from the text.
— Donald Spoto
I see but one rule: to be clear.
— Stendhal
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
— William Zinsser
Back to list of topics.
Word Choice
Eschew obfuscation.
— A bumper sticker
"Are you excavating a subterranean channel?" asked the scholar. "No sir," replied the farmer. "I am only digging a ditch."
— An old joke
Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.
— Toni Cade Bambara
"How am I to know," the despairing writer asks, "which the right word is?" The reply must be . . . "The wanted word is the one most nearly true." True to what? Your vision and your purpose.
— Elizabeth Bowen
If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you it’s quite conscious.
— Kingman Brewster, Jr.
She calls a spade a delving instrument.
— Rita Mae Brown
The South understands language. You should live there if you want to be a writer.
— Rita Mae Brown
The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes and hung them like bangles in my mind.
— Hortense Calisher
Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.
— Eddie Cantor
An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.
— Alain de Lille
Cut these words and they would bleed.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A writer wastes nothing.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.
— J. W. Goethe
I know there are professors in this country who "ligate" arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops bleeding just as well.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A van loaded with copies of Roget’s Thesaurus collided with a taxi. Witnesses were astounded, shocked, taken aback, surprised, startled, dumbfounded, thunderstruck, and caught unawares.
— Imprint
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson, quoting a college tutor
That must be fine, for I don’t understand a word.
— Molière
Do not be grand. Try to get the ordinary into your writing — breakfast tables rather than the solar system; Middletown today, not Mankind through the ages.
— Darcy O’Brien
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
— Flannery O’Connor
I apologize for this long letter; I didn’t have time to shorten it.
— Pliny
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.
— Carl Sandburg
Words are weapons.
— George Santayana
Words are loaded pistols.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I might not know how to use thirty-four words where three would do, but that does not mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
— Ruth Shays
Concision is honesty, honesty concision—that’s one thing you need to know.
— John Simon
Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.
— Gladys Taber
A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as "humanitary," which have a paralysis in their tails.
— Henry David Thoreau
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
— Evelyn Waugh
Be obscure clearly.
— E. B. White
One writes to find words’ meanings.
— Joy Williams
Wrestling with words gave me my moments of greatest meaning.
— Richard Wright
Back to list of topics.