(cdibble at umd dot edu)
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
Joseph Pulitzer
In your writing, be strong, defiant, forbearing. Have a point to make and write to it. Dare to say what you want most to say, and say it as plainly as you can. Whether or not you write well, write bravely.
Bill Stout
... the definition of genius is the ability to get on paper more of what is in the mind of the writer than other writers are able to get on paper.
Professor Brookley
NPR Morning Edition (1 February 1995)
Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do about it.
Maxwell Perkins
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end--that is what you must be able to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.
John Steinbeck
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut
Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
E. B. White
What can be said at all, can be said clearly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
William Strunk, Jr.
The Elements of Style
I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
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?... Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
George Orwell "Politics and the English Language"
I'm scared all the time, which is always good. You have to be scared or you're not working hard enough. So for the time being, I am where I belong.
Sue Grafton
I think it's a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it's finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
PS -- I disagree with this last quote, which is why I included it here to ponder... I think of the telling as an important form of testing and refining new ideas.
(cdibble at umd dot edu)