Wallace Stegner Quotes

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

Omit needless words.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

It has often been said there’s so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is. And that's why your books have such power and strength. You publish with shorth! (Shorth is better than length.)

Easy reading requires hard writing.

You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.

The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

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.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Vigorous writing is concise.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

Good writing is everything.

I work real hard so the reader doesn't have to. I don't want them to have to look up words.

I want it to be easy to read. I'm not writing exotic literature.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

People who want to express themselves effectively can learn a lot from the hard-won concision of the copywriter.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.