Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That’s what I’ve done.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

When asked, ‚How do you write?‘ I invariably answer, ‚one word at a time.‘

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online – but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can’t use the net unless you can read.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?