Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a…

Clutter is the disease of American writing,

— William Zinsser

“This sentence is filled with unnecessary words, phrases and rhetorical throat-clearing devices and is marked by a generally bombastic tone.”

— Charles M. Fox

It is sometimes necessary to use unnecessary words like thank you and please just to make life prettier.

— Anonymous

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and…

— Susan Sontag

Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people…

— Suzanne Vega

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

— Alberto Manguel

Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon…

— William Zinsser

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

— Eric Hoffer

I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind…

— Kiese Laymon

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot…

— Jamaica Kincaid

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There…

— Hemingway, Ernest

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

— Ishmael Reed

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore…

— Tim Cahill

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.

— Ishmael Reed

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

— Arthur Miller