Quotes About Conciseness

Aphorism: a concise, clever statement. Afterism: a concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.

Epigrams succeed where epics fail.

An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject.

Write until you have nothing left to say and then stop writing. Focus on content and quality rather than word count.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.

The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness

Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it's blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.

Standup is like shorthand. Every bit must be both brief and profound or the audience will lose interest.

In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and, hopefully, in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half a minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty.

I have personally seen statements that were longer than some books I have read.

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

I still remember the first acronym I learned, BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. I still try to communicate that way. No reason to dance around getting to the point.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

Be obscure clearly.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

There was a way, of course, to deal with the papers. If the ears of the reporters were geared to capture accurately the mediocre remarks of mediocre men, then one had to look for simple salient statements, so poetically bare, but so irreducible, that they would stick in the reporter's mind like a thorn.