Fran Lebowitz Quotes

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Those who write clearly have readers.

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

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

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

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

I think in most cases, unless you're writing about a character who is garrulous, you say what you've got to say and then get out. Those little conjunctions, those little turnaround words help you do it. That's the way I like to write: I get rid of things rather than add them.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

Easy reading requires hard writing.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

Writing is really hard, and it's really a skill.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Writing is hard - writing is the hardest.

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

It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw words together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail ourselves of the true idiom of the language.

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.

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

People don't read me and say, 'Oh, it's so clean and elegant.'