A Quote by Barbara Tuchman

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

Barbara Tuchman

Quote Topics

Ear Element Essential Good Good Writing Listen Must Own Prose Sound Writing

Quote Author

Barbara Tuchman
American - Historian
January 30, 1912 - February 6, 1989

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.

Barbara Tuchman

I could never overstate the importance of a musician's need to develop his or her ear. Actually, I believe that developing a good 'inner ear' - the art of being able to decipher musical components solely through listening - is the most important element in becoming a good musician.

Steve Vai

I like entertainment. I'm an innate admirer of good entertainment. I'll listen to MTV, I'll listen to Mozart, I'll listen to anything that has a good element in it.

Jack Kirby

It's definitely about the rhythm of the words and how they sound together, writing one sentence and then another and another and cutting something immediately if it doesn't feel true. I come from a family of musicians and - while I have no musical abilities of my own - I think I inherited a good ear.

Mary J. Miller

Avoid theatrical flourishes - the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good writing," and therefore must be struck from the text.

Donald Spoto

Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.

Georgia Heard

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

Tennessee Williams

One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and pettiness and murderousness.

Russell Smith

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

John Cheever

It was frustrating that young people, through no fault of their own, were listening to terrible $2 ear buds. You can't get good sound out of those.

Jimmy Iovine

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

Tom Odell

All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.

James Agate

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Jorge Luis Borges

Every guitarist has a special quality of sound. The best ones will use a good ear, much sensitivity and a thorough knowledge of music to prepare the nuances and colors of sound.