Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.