Concision Quotes

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

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

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.

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.

How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

Short form media is reductionist by nature.

Vigorous writing is concise.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.

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

Concision in art is a necessity and an elegance. The verbose painter bores: who will get rid of all these trimmings?

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

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

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

Concision is a technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic.

I labor to be brief, and manage to be obscure.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

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.

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.

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.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

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