Patricia MacLachlan Quotes

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

Simple is the only way I can write.

I tend to write short, brief snippets - I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.

I'm out of the terse Hemingway school.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

I keep everything very simple. I like telling stories.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.

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.

To grow up under really simple circumstances, and to understand that certain things were ornamental... that made an impression on me as a child and is something I use.

Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.

I'm the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

I think the best advice I give is to try not to write. Try not to overwrite, try not to make it sound too good. Just use your own voice. Use your own style of putting it down.

I've been accused of being a minimalist writer. I don't like a lot of verbiage in there.

I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

I'm trying to take more nothing time - and that means sacrificing doing. It's partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your head. My ideal is to go back to when I was a child. My life is quieter than it used to be. More and more I don't really want to talk to people. I'd make a good nun, actually.

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.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

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