Ian Mcewan Quotes

American writers reduce the length of time devoted to exposition and character development.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

Short form media is reductionist by nature.

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue and be short in the story itself.

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

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.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

'Words, Words, Words' was very much its title. It's just words, words, words and trying to show that I can pack as much material into an hour as I possibly could word count-wise.

I use circumlocution too often, and instead of getting my point across, I tend to babble.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.