"It is also true that one can..." - Quote by George Orwell
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
More by George Orwell
“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.”
“Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.”
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
More on Writing
“Every once in a while, I get mad. 'The Lorax' came out of my being angry. The ecology books I'd read were dull... In 'The Lorax,' I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.”
“Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.”
“Reconnaissance memoranda should always be written in the simplest style and be purely descriptive. They should never stray from their objective by introducing extraneous ideas.”
More on Style
“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”
“When you catch an adjective, kill it - perhaps the best possible advice for budding writers.”
“I'm not into fashion, but I like design. I wear the same shoes every day.”