Bill > Bill's Quotes

“Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
― Elmore Leonard

“Everybody was screaming for joy. That's what children do - they scream because life is just too much for them but they don't know it yet.”
― Walter Mosley, Black Betty

“In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”
― Dennis Lehane

“He had a gun in every room of the house. They were like good friends who were always down to do bad things.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

“She had a teddy bear in her arms and murder in her eyes.”
― Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun

“And my life went to pieces, like a love letter in the rain.”
― Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

“I'd've worn a nicer towel if I'd known this was going to be formal.”
― Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

“I make it a policy never to argue with drug lawyers: they have decent arguments and the best drugs.”
― James Crumley, The Mexican Tree Duck

“Her name was Mildred Atkinson and she had led a very stupid life. Grade school, high school—Hollywood High but she was no beauty queen—business college and a job in an insurance office. She was twenty-six years old and she was a good girl, her parents sobbed. She played bridge with girl friends and she once taught a Sunday-school class. She didn’t have any particular gentleman friend, she went out with several. Not often, you could bet. The only exciting thing that had ever happened to her was to be raped and murdered. Even then she’d only been subbing for someone else.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?”
― William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley

“Her voice was somewhere in the lower register of gold.”
― Walter Mosley, And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“The truth is no one can be fully protected. Safety is an illusion. There is no safety. Just downtime between tragedies.”
― S.A. Cosby, My Darkest Prayer

“But comfortable is to art what sugar is to tea. Too much and you ruin it.”
― S.A. Cosby, My Darkest Prayer

“At the riding pace I would need to maintain for my double-transcontinental feat, physiologist calculated the effort being equivalent to doing a full Ironman Triathlon every day. ...it would be similar to climbing 102 flights of stairs to the top of the Empire State Building 40 times per day.”
― Lon Haldeman, PROOF: Cycling Pioneer: A Record-Setting Ride from New York City to Los Angeles and Back

“I bet there were thousands of better cyclists capable of going faster. The only thing that made me unique was that I was out here doing it.”
― Lon Haldeman, PROOF: Cycling Pioneer: A Record-Setting Ride from New York City to Los Angeles and Back