Quotes About Brevity

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief... but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back.

the maximum number of syllables in the minimum number of seconds,

Script writing advice, from (William?) Rotsler (p.80) Funny is better than serious Short is better than long Short and funny is where you stop.

Anything that can be put in a nutshell, should remain there.

Nobody has time for your priceless prose. Get to the point.

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe's narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace) we come to accept life's brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! That is another matter.

Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.

It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

Nothing is longer than a little while.

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.

Vigorous writing is concise. 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.1

I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.

Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!

Considerations of Aesthetics and Fascination: You should strive for brevity, which is concise and efficient expression, as well as beauty, which is the melodic or poetic aspect of your language (at all the requisite levels of analysis). Finally, you should not be bored, or boring. If you are bored while writing, then, most importantly, you are doing it wrong, and you will bore your reader.

You should strive for brevity, which is concise and efficient expression, as well as beauty, which is the melodic or poetic aspect of your language. [...] That state of mind is partly aesthetic. You have to be trying to produce something of worth, beauty and elegance. Do you plan to settle for ugly and uncouth? Do you want to destroy, instead of build?

Essere al mondo, per quello che ho potuto capire, è quando ti è affidata una persona e tu ne sei responsabile e allo stesso tempo tu sei affidato a quella persona ed essa è responsabile per te. Sette anni non furono pochi. Anche se fossero stati la metà o la metà ancora, non sarebbe stato poco. Non ci si può lamentare della brevità, non è giusto, ma della lunghezza si.

Vigorous writing is concise. 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.

Mission statements are long, dull, and forgettable.

BE BRIEF. Brevity beats verbosity in social media. You're competing with millions of posts every day. People make snap judgments and move right along if you don't capture their interest at a glance. My experience is that the sweet spot for posts of curated content is two or three sentences on Google+ and Facebook and 100 characters on Twitter. The sweet spot for content that you create, such as blog posts, is 500 to 1,000 words.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

We don't communicate in full sentences anyway. We don't need all those words.