Quotes About Conciseness

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.

Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity In least speak most, to my capacity.

He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers.

The art of the three-minute song is more like journalism than writing a big 400-page book. You want to be brief, you want to make sense right yen and there. And sometimes that takes a bit of work.

If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.

A theory that explains everything, explains nothing

I've noticed that women often have a tendency to explain their thinking first ("I came across a study that said . . .") rather than get right to the point. By the time they describe the actual idea, they've lost people's attention despite how good the concept may be. Then

Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Though the daily paper contains much that is swill, it also contains some good writing. From it you can learn to write leanly, you can learn to get to the point, and you can learn to compress several facts into a single clear sentence.

C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book.

Too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.

Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences

Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.

Simplicity is the shortest distance between two points.

Simplicity is eloquence

Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.

Painting is just like making an after-dinner speech. If you want to be remembered, say one thing and stop.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

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

First be sure that you know exactly what you want to say. Then be sure you have said exactly that.

I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business.

The biggest problem is that people want to tell the whole story, and they write letters that are way longer than anything I could possibly run.

One can find precious value in brevity

I think the power of messaging is saying something in as few words as possible, because I think we all essentially have ADD. It's not a clinically diagnosed state anymore; it's a socially imposed state.