Jonathan Raban
“Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.”
WILLIAM ZINNSSER
“To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire.”
VIRGINIA WOOLF
“Only write when your pillow is on fire.”
ELIE WIESEL
“Do not fire too much over the heads of your readers.”
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
“A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
“Avoid the use of qualifiers. Rather, very, little, pretty— these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.”
WILLIAM STRUNK, JR.
“Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly what is there.”
JOHN GARDNER