#craft

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..." "What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh. "Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity." "A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously. ↗

— P.D. James

#style #talent #writers #writing #writing-craft

Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth. ↗

— Stella Atrium

#writing-craft #writing-craft

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess. ↗

— Gene Wolfe

#writing-craft

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad. ↗

— Jessica Lave

#writing-craft #writing-craft

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe. ↗

— Horace Walpole

#writing-style #writing-craft

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable ↗

— Jacques Barzun

#writing-craft

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#baker #become #compelled #craft #curious

Washington is like a self-sealing tank on a military aircraft. When a bullet passes through, it closes up. ↗

— Dean Acheson

#bullet #closes #like #military #passes

At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence. ↗

— Ray Stannard Baker

#back #belonged #comparatively #conducted #craft

In recent years, breweries and brew pubs have flourished across the Nation. And, as the Representative from Oregon's fourth district, I have enjoyed seeing the diversity that craft brewery has fueled across the Nation. ↗

— Peter DeFazio

#brew #breweries #craft #district #diversity