Quotes About Conciseness

scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

INTERVIEWER What do you mean by "too literary"? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words? SIMENON Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

I think that one of Tim's great qualities and abilities is in what seems like a thumbnail sketch to get something quite telling, very simply, when you're doing it or being in that thumbnail sketch, you don't feel that it's important.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages.

Details aren't automatically interesting.

Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.

Amplification through simplification.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

I'm going to make a long speech because I've not had the time to prepare a short one.

Writing can be either readable or precise, but not at the same time.

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.

Don't have too much story for the time you have.

I am sorry to have made such a long speech, but I did not have time to write a shorter one.

As a mom, you just don't have time, so you get straight to the point.

I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...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.

Eschew surplusage.

I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm writing you a long one instead.

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.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

A word too much always defeats its purpose.