31 Brevity Quotes

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.

There are single thoughts that contain the essence of the whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of large work.

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust.

Matter of fact, the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with. That gets you to page 123 or so, which is a nice length, a nice novella sort of length.

There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know precisely what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and want badly to say it, then all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice.

As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words - two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas - a series of ideas stuck together.

(After playing Napalm Death's one-second song 'You Suffer') Haha, it can't be that short.

[Peter Jennings:] What do you feel? [Khomeini:] Nothing!

I'm sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter.

It's okay - I know.

Be sincere, be brief, be seated.

Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty, and it shan't be long.

The law of simplicity and naivete applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

Jack: [out of shot] Darn right I am.

The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

I never heard so much content in so short a period. ~ Pinchas Zukerman

Once, adj. Enough.