Quotes About Writing Less Is More

#1. Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

David Ives

#2. I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

John Darnielle

#3. I don't sit down at nine in the morning and begin writing and then take a break for lunch and stop at four. I have no structure like that. I am at my computer constantly, more or less attached to it. I live on-line and hate being off-line and don't care how unhealthy it is.

Augusten Burroughs

#4. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.

C.S. Lewis

#5. Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment ... is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can't provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.

C.S. Lewis

#6. Without children, men have more liberty to earn less - that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies.

Warren Farrell

#7. I've never worked with a co-author before [Alison McGhee]. Writing for me is a pretty scary thing, so it was a huge comfort to have someone in the room working with me. It became less like work and more like play.

Kate DiCamillo

#8. I wish I wasn't so in love, wasn't so interested, in the Internet. I wish I spent less time online and more time outside and in my head. Writing requires solitude and deep, deep daydreaming, and the Internet just kills that - its lure is toward the external; it asks you to flit from place to place.

Edan Lepucki

#9. There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books.

J.M. Coetzee

#10. World creation should be an effort of great and covetous love.

Micah R. Sisk

#11. Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.

Ishmael Reed

#12. Lyrically, 'less words mean more' is a pretty good rule of thumb. Try to cut out the fat and get to the meat of what you're saying.

Chris Stapleton

#13. What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#14. Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Andre Maurois

#15. The Chinese say that there is no scenery in your home town. They're right. Being in another place heightens the senses, allows you to see more, enjoy more, take delight in small things; it makes life richer. You feel more alive, less cocooned.

Jane Wilson-Howarth

#16. Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Andrew Sullivan

#17. Writing, for all that it's harder than nursing ever was, is also more joyous and more fun and a lot less dangerous. And the major themes of my life have become the major themes of my writing, too - so it has all worked out pretty well.

Holly Lisle

#18. I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.

William Gibson

#19. The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.

Mike Carey

#20. The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.

Edwidge Danticat

#21. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.

Annie Dillard

#22. That's good. You see, boxing and writing are very similar. You get in the guard position, you decide to throw yourself into battle, you lift your fists, and you hurl yourself at your opponent. A book is more or less the same. A book is a battle.

Joel Dicker

#23. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

Paul Theroux

#24. Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.

Padgett Powell

#25. I write because the act of writing itself is what drives me. It's a private communication within myself - nothing more or less. This doesn't mean I do not want to share with people.

Michael Hersch

#26. The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.

Gabrielle Roy

#27. Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

Sarah Waters

#28. Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.

Guy Debord

#29. Writing is like anything else - the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you'll be about what's going to happen to it, where it's going, what it sounds like, whether it's right.

Wayne Dyer

#30. I like to take writing retreats within a day's drive of home. Less travel time means more time for writing, which is the name of the game here.

Kate Klise

#31. Nimzovitch became then for me more or less the author of the only book which could help me get away from these Euwe books, which, I admit, are very good for the ordinary club player. But once you've reached a certain strength you get the impression that everything that Euwe writes is a lie.

Bent Larsen

#32. One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

Marilynne Robinson

#33. Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry - banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up,

David Byrne

#34. Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

Clifford Geertz

#35. So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!

Tracy Chevalier