Dense Writing Quotes

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

Good writing , like gold , combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.

I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

My writing tends to become very dense, so I have to keep some cushion. Sometimes, words that seem superfluous are actually essential for the overall effect.

When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they'd kind of be like popcorn kernels popping... all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density.

What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions.

And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.