Precise Writing Quotes

#1. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Julian Barnes

#2. He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.

Evelyn Waugh

#3. I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.

Danny Boyle

#4. Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

James Baldwin

#5. At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance.

Paul Tournier

#6. Writing can be either readable or precise, but not at the same time.

Bertrand Russell

#7. As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths.

Justine Picardie

#8. If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Joyce Carol Oates

#9. When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.

Ralph Fletcher

#10. I don't know if anyone ever "wins" a war, Jeth.

Irene Hunt

#11. He wouldn't write a letter because he couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' He's that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them.

Ford Madox Ford

#12. Try - Takes the infinitive: "try to mend it," not "try and mend it." Students of the language will argue that 'try and' has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is relaxed and acceptable. But 'try to' is precise, and when you are writing formal prose, try and write 'try to.

William Strunk Jr.

#13. Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.

Rich Sommer

#14. The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic.

James K. Morrow

#15. The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God ... or an artist and a writer.

Vera Nazarian

#16. When I write, I speak with ghosts for years, and I see images that are a little bit out of focus. I see faces, but the faces change. At the moment that it's a real human being that's flesh and bone, it changes a character. It's much more precise and complex.

Jaco Van Dormael

#17. To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

Georges Perec

#18. Stout was a leader - quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong, very thoughtful and remarkably innovative. Whether speaking or writing, he was economical with words, precise, vivid. One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed. Neither

Robert M. Edsel

#19. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become
and such lucidity is a form of joy.

Eva Hoffman

#20. She didn't say a work, and I gave up trying, because you couldn't hear either one of us over the shattering noise of hearts breaking and the looming shadow of the last word, the one we refused to say.

Kami Garcia

#21. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.

Etgar Keret

#22. This is Zemzem near Mecca. According to this, however, Hagar headed into the Arabian Peninsula rather than toward Egypt.

Abraham Meir Ben Ibn Ezra

#23. When you take the right stairs you will arrive at the precise destination.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#24. You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't ... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

Witold Gombrowicz