Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling.

Gene Weingarten

Categorized in : Writing Dancing Vocabulary

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

Gene Weingarten

rich want writing

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

Gene Weingarten

one-thing writing thinking

It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.

Gene Weingarten

pain spring needs

I think we too often go soft in trying to spare people the agony of confronting reality.

Gene Weingarten

agony reality thinking

The horrifying thing is that nearly half of America seems in synch with xenophobia and race-baiting.

Gene Weingarten

xenophobia race america

The verb "Garland" should be created. It would mean to unfairly put a stinking albatross around someone's neck, to make him unemployable.

Gene Weingarten

albatross verbs mean

Ask creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It's the most common question, but it's also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline.

Gene Weingarten

creativity eye inspiration

One thing I am learning from the kitten is that everything he is doing seems to be in preparation for murder.

Gene Weingarten

kitten murder preparation

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

Gene Weingarten

monsters believe people

I like to eat alone in restaurants, with a book, particularly if I am out of town, alone, on business. It's relaxing. I feel not even a twinge of embarrassment. Is this gender-related? Is there a lingering feeling among women that if they are alone in public, they will be judged to be spinsters or spinsters-to-be?

Gene Weingarten

towns feelings book

Hillary Clinton rubs people the wrong way, for valid reasons.

Gene Weingarten

reason people way

I disagree with those who suggest that we permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it can kill you. That is sheer hysteria. I think we should permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it has been making us sick for quite a while.

Gene Weingarten

hysteria sick thinking

It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

Gene Weingarten

steak sides order

You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan - I was 12 when he was murdered - but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president. Many put him in the second tier, below the big three and surrounded by Truman and Eisenhower. Kennedy moved our soul. Changed our thinking about service and governance. And won big in the greatest nuclear crisis of the Cold War.

Gene Weingarten

soul war thinking

Peggy Noonan is not as good a columnist as my colleague Kathleen Parker, in my opinion, but they share something related to their Pulitzers. Kathleen won in in 2010. They won it for a similar reason. They broke from their crowd, and sprinted away. They delivered the politically unexpected take, at some peril to their readership.

Gene Weingarten

unexpected opinion reason

I think Marco Rubio could never have recovered from revealing himself to be pathetic.

Gene Weingarten

marcos revealing thinking

Life entails risk, and you have to draw some lines.

Gene Weingarten

draws lines risk

I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.

Gene Weingarten

phones talking giving

Every single fat comic uses his weight as a punchline. There is something sad about that.

Gene Weingarten

comic weight use

I don't think the people of Chicago should be robbed of their birthright to be perennial losers.

Gene Weingarten

chicago people thinking