A Quote by Steven Pinker

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Steven Pinker

Quote Topics

Acquire Engineering Examples Good Prose Reverse Savoring Technique Writers

Quote Author

Steven Pinker
Canadian - Scientist
Born: September 18, 1954

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

Julian Barnes

To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

Francis Crick

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Billy Collins

I try to show good technique - boxing technique, wrestling technique, jiu jitsu technique.

Andrei Arlovski

The way to develop the habit of savoring is to pause when something is beautiful and good and catches our attention - the sound of rain, the look of the night sky - the glow in a child's eyes, or when we witness some kindness. Pause... then totally immerse in the experience of savoring it.

Tara Brach

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass

Copying is about reverse-engineering.

Austin Kleon

Inexperienced fiction and creative nonfiction writers are often told to show, not tell - to write scenes, dramatize, cut exposition, cut summary - but it can be misguided advice. Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose

Laurie Alberts

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

I'm always good at seeing five, ten steps ahead. Like, really thinking ahead, you know? Reverse engineering, whatever it is, you know.

Michael B. Jordan

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.