Agent Bork: Chief! Ya know that guy whose camper they were whackin' off in?
Agent Fleming: Bork, you're a federal agent! You represent the United States Government! Never end a sentence with a preposition.
Agent Bork: Oh, uh... Ya know that guy in whose camper they... I... I mean, that guy off in whose camper they were whacking?
- Beavis and Butthead Do America"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." - Fred Allen
"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" - Calvin
"I hate writing on a deadline... inspiration is amazing" - Byron Chin
"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack." - Winston Churchill
"Brevity is best." - Andrew D. Goldstein
"The first draft of anything is shit." - Ernest Hemingway
"That's always been the problem with literature -- finding a justification for it. It really doesn't serve any practical purpose, you know." - Itagne, David Eddings' The Shining Ones
"Dr. Flaherty remarks that depression among writers is eight to ten times higher than among the general population. My own nonscientific response to this is that it makes very good sense, since there must be eight to ten times more people writing than there ought to be." - Joseph Epstein
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." - Rudyard Kipling
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." - George Orwell
Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
- William Safire's Great Rules of Writing"We've sugar coated our language to the point that it has become difficult to recognize exactly what it is we are referring to. I did not have sex with that woman. What? OK, so you didn't technically stick your dick in that place; but you sure as shit stuck it in that other place. Its all the same - stop saying its not. Stop mincing words. Stop parsing every statement. Stop watering your deeds down with pansy language." - Bret Schlyer
"I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech ... Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're inocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and [he] knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead." - Tom Stoppard
"Edgar Allan Poe's prose is unreadable-like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane's." - Mark Twain
"Omit needless words." - Strunk and White