Top 44 Quotes About Adverbs
#2. It becomes a matter to be put to the test of battle, when someone makes a conjunction of a word which belongs in the bailiwick of the adverbs.
Erasmus
#3. To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.
Maya Angelou
#4. Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it's actually quite dark.
Daniel Handler
#5. I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.
Charles Stross
#7. There's enough adverbs in the world for you to start creating new ones.
Christopher Owens
#8. For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of "Is your novel an open work or not?" How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or "With which of your characters do you identify?" For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.
Umberto Eco
#9. Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.
Lev Grossman
#11. Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.
David Mitchell
#12. Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
Annie Dillard
#14. If you've used adverbs, look at them carefully. Adverbs are the weakest words; verbs are the strongest. Many, many times I've found that I have the wrong verb so I'm attempting to cheat and modify the wrong verb by using an adverb.
Chris Offutt
#15. The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.
Maya Angelou
#16. Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
Henry James
#17. Don Basilio was a severe, forbidden-looking man who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or of someone with a vitamin deficiency.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#18. Breathe deep."
"Deeply," I forced out through my tingling mouth.
"What?"
"Deeply. Adverbs follow verbs."
"Seriously? You're giving me a grammar lesson in the middle of your barfing?
Rachel Hawthorne
#19. Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can.
Anton Chekhov
#20. I'm glad you like adverbs - I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James
#21. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
#22. The question that arises as we use all these adjectives and adverbs to describe our physicians as we approach a Supreme Court nominee is where are we in America when we decide that it's legal to kill our unborn children?
Tom Coburn
#23. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.
E.B. White
#24. I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.
Mark Twain
#25. Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#26. God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well.
Joseph Hall
#27. All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
Stephen King
#28. I get imaginative with a mouth full of adjectives,
A brain full of adverbs, and a box full of laxatives,
Shittin' on rappers, causin' hospital accidents.
Eminem
#29. Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."
Bill Moyers
#30. It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.
Daniel Handler
#31. The miracle is the adverbs. The way things are done.
Daniel Handler
#32. Ah! I--to you, Petrovitch, this--" It must be known that Akakiy Akakievitch expressed himself chiefly by prepositions, adverbs, and scraps of phrases which had no meaning whatever.
Nikolai Gogol
#33. I am such a person of words. I've spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off.
Frederick Buechner
#34. A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction
besides unexpected interludes
has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.
Yann Martel
#35. Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there
put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.
Daniel Handler
#36. How many happy people do you think there are in the world? Twelve?
Daniel Handler
#37. I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what's back of the action.
Roy Stryker
#38. We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.
Daniel Handler
#39. He thought she knew what he meant, but the biggest mistake you can make is thinking they know what you mean.
Daniel Handler
#40. This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed this over. This unites us, this part of love.
Daniel Handler
#41. Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.
Howard Mittelmark
#42. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases.
Daniel Handler
#43. If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
Kingsley Amis
#44. All the deaths are dead for nothing but you're not dead at all.
Daniel Handler
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
