Favourite Highlights

• Fiction and nonfiction resemble each other far more closely than they do any actual event. Their techniques are essentially the same, apart from sheer invention.
• You were being taught to manage the evidence gathered from other authorities instead of cultivating your own - to simulate logic but not to write so clearly that what you were saying seemed self-evident.
• Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world, rather than siphoning the world into you.
• Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.
• Writing doesn’t flow, unless you’re plagiarizing or collecting cliches or enlisting volunteer sentences.
• “Inspiration” is what gets you to the keyboard, and that’s where it leaves you.
• In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself. Your clarity will differ from anyone else’s without your intending to make it differ.
• The thought isn’t primary or absolute. The thought is only a hint. Language offers guidance and resistance both. The sentence becomes the thought by bringing it fully into being.
• Stop fearing what you’ll find as you think.
• Learn to accept the discontinuity between yourself and what you write.
• Imagine how obnoxious that is, that persistent effort to predetermine and overgovern the reader’s response.
• Your grace, your authority, doesn’t borrow the subject’s validity: It creates it.
• The first person who needs to be persuaded of your authority is you.
• Don’t preconceive the reader’s limitations. They’ll become your own.
• Revise towards brevity - remove words instead of adding them.