10 Quotes by James J. Kilpatrick

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry.

Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.

Style is important, but content comes first.

Baseball ought never be hurried. It is the only unhurried institution we have left, which is one reason, I think, we love it.

Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.

Louis Kelso’s formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too.

It wasn’t the Supreme Court that expelled God from our public school classrooms. It was the textbook publishers.

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.