Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.
“On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.”
“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear”
“I think George Washington owned guns. I've never seen any contradiction with that.”
“No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.”
“Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it”
“There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.”
“Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.”
“Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.”
“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”