“The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land.” PeopleWantHelpingInterestingBehindsBreakClearLandReaderAmbitionCleanRateBoxesNewspapersCurtainsIdenticalLace Author:Arthur Christiansen
“The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.” WayBookGoneReaderCleanFishesScalesGutsFedsTailsSlidesSealsSkillfulSpeedingFins Author:William H. Gass
“One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper.” ShouldHas BeensCharacterStoriesSeemsActionParticularReaderSafeModelsTraditionForgivingCleanWesternBonesPsychologicalNarrativeLoudConventionsRealismBugsForgive MeTropes Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.” IfsKnowsWritingBeautifulMovingLanguageLinesHavensPoetReaderSkinsCleanSentencesTargetChasingEnglish LanguageJoyce Author:Teju Cole
“I like nudging readers into a slightly different perspective, but in a sly way - I want to be the writer who slips a stiletto in and out, to make so swift and clean a cut, it's not until a chapter ends that the reader looks down and sees she's bleeding and asks what happened.” WayWantLooksDifferentEndsAsksCuttingHappenedPerspectiveReaderDown AndCleanSlipsChaptersBleedingDifferent PerspectiveSlyStilettos Author:Kathryn Harrison
“Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.” GivingWritingTryingWellsImportantNiceWrittenReaderCleanSurfaceBe GoodTake MeTransparentWell Written Author:Shelby Steele