James J. Kilpatrick Quotes

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

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

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.

Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit....They have to fit in context.

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.

Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway.

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.

Style is important, but content comes first.

Find out where the people want to go, then hustle yourself around in front of them.

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.

The ...experts of the FDA have declared Laetrile to be worthless...quackery and fraud...These experts are the professional descendants of experts...confident that mental illness should be cured by drilling holes in the skull, the better to let the demons out. ...This is the Orwellian fashion in which the medical establishment throws its weight around.

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.