Five Great Quotations about Craft of Writing

“Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked… One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.” – Janet Fitch

“Details are the Life of Prose.” — Jack Kerouac

“Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” – Ezra Pound

“Easy writing makes hard reading.” – Ernest Hemingway

“The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there’s also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.” – Garth Stein