Attention Quote by William Strunk, Jr

“the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are…

— Robert W. Bly

“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,”

— Steven Pinker

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to…

— Harold Bloom

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius,…

— Andre Aciman

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature…

— Leland Ryken

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with…

— Michael Finkel

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their…

— Jean de la Bruyere

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the…

— Virginia Woolf

You always need to make sure that you're looking at every angle and every perspective so that people, when they read the story, know…

— Marley Dias

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary…

— Raymond Queneau

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The…

— Ashwin Sanghi

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and…

— Agnes Repplier