James J. Kilpatrick Quotes

#1. Find out where the people want to go, then hustle yourself around in front of them.

James J. Kilpatrick

#2. Style is important, but content comes first.

James J. Kilpatrick

#3. The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

James J. Kilpatrick

#4. It wasn't the Supreme Court that expelled God from our public school classrooms. It was the textbook publishers.

James J. Kilpatrick

#5. If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.

James J. Kilpatrick

#6. Louis Kelso's formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too.

James J. Kilpatrick

#7. Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit ... They have to fit in context.

James J. Kilpatrick

#8. Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.

James J. Kilpatrick

#9. Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.

James J. Kilpatrick

#10. Baseball ought never be hurried. It is the only unhurried institution we have left, which is one reason, I think, we love it.

James J. Kilpatrick