About 25 years ago, someone said, “Ask David the time, and he’ll explain how to build a clock.” Then I found Twitter in 2010 and turned writing into a game: how much impact can I make in 140 characters? That challenge launched my writing career. These days, I sometimes lean too far toward brevity—but when revising, it’s easier to grow a sharp idea than slog through a swamp of words.

Here are some of my favorite quotes on writing:

His Majesty the King requires that the Royal Chancellery in all written documents endeavor to write in clear, plain Swedish.

— King Charles XII of Sweden, 1713

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

— George Eliot

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

— H.W. Fowler

The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

— Robert Heinlein

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

— Thomas Jefferson

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who instead of aiming a single stone at an object takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

— Samuel Johnson

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.

— James J. Kilpatrick

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

— C.S. Lewis

Many a poem is marred by a superfluous word.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Good Prose should be transparent—like a window pane. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

— George Orwell

The shorter and the plainer the better.

— Beatrix Potter

I love words but I don’t like strange ones. You don’t understand them and they don’t understand you. Old words is like old friends, you know ‘em the minute you see ‘em.

— Will Rogers

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

— Robert Southey

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

— William Strunk and E. B. White

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.

— Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself. Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. I never write “metropolis” for seven cents when I can write “city” and get paid the same. As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.

— Mark Twain, Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

— Mark Twain, Letter to D. W. Bowser, 20 March 1880

Use the smallest word that does the job.

— E.B. White

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

— William Butler Yeats

Be grateful for every word you can cut. Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.

— William Zinsser