Minimalist Writing Quotes

As a writer, you paint strokes and leave suggestions so readers can create their own pictures. That allows you to know someone by a small action and it saves countless pages of explanation.

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

We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

I like Raymond Carver's poetry a lot.

The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.

Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, "Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?"

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

I think I have always sort of cultivated a flowery writing style. I've always sort of over - written in every genre that I've attempted. I went to college and took a couple of writing classes and I remember my teachers were always incredibly encouraging. But it was inevitable to get the criticism: "Take it down a notch!" But the nice thing about screenwriting is that you don't really have to.

The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.