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Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose. -- Dick Schaap
A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation. -- Mark Twain
I think 'ambitious' is one of those adjectives used for women in a derogatory way. -- Clare Balding
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps. -- Angela Carter
In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names. -- Mortimer Adler
To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time. -- Gregory Bateson
Frankly I've never really subscribed to these adjectives tagging me as an 'icon', 'superstar', etc. I've always thought of myself as an actor doing his job to the best of his ability. -- Amitabh Bachchan
I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days. -- Dick Schaap
I like me better naked. I don't mean that in a vain way... When you put clothes on, you immediately put a character on. Clothes are adjectives, they are indicators. When you don't have any clothes on, it's just you, raw, and you can't hide. -- Padma Lakshmi
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry. -- W. H. Auden
Adjectives are the curse of America. -- Rita Mae Brown
When you catch an adjective, kill it. -- Mark Twain
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out. -- Mark Twain
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt. -- Henry James
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech. -- Clifton Fadiman
Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts. -- Harper Lee
I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous. -- Angela Carter
The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it's just used as adjective. -- Mira Sorvino
The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place, -- William Strunk, Jr.
I get imaginative with a mouth full of adjectives, A brain full of adverbs, and a box full of laxatives, Shittin' on rappers, causin' hospital accidents. -- Eminem
But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night? -- Logan Pearsall Smith
As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning. -- Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart. -- Mark Twain
Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless. -- Donald Hall
The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her. -- David Ogilvy
My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more. -- Jacques Barzun
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two. -- Larry McMurtry
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. -- Mark Twain
First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives. -- W. Somerset Maugham
If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you've probably chosen the wrong something. -- Roger Rosenblatt
I know I look good. The regular adjectives that come my way - sexy, hot, dusky, bong bombshell... I love them. -- Bipasha Basu
Millennials are often portrayed as apathetic, disinterested, tuned out and selfish. None of those adjectives describe the Millennials I've been privileged to meet and work with. -- Chelsea Clinton
A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime. -- Sufjan Stevens
I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments. -- Isabel Allende
A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction. -- Isabel Allende
If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives, and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description. -- Henry Cabot Lodge
If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication. -- Ian Anderson
When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses. -- Omari Hardwick
The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school. -- William Gibson
I start looking for adjectives in news reporting, and if there are too many of them, if they're all sort of repeatedly designed to influence my thinking in a certain way, I start getting concerned. I'm leery of people trying to paint a picture in a certain way. -- Thomas Sadoski
I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference. -- Simon Schama
I remember in second grade, everybody in the class had to come up with adjectives for each other, and I got shy. In a way, I force myself to perform, because if I didn't, I'd stay home rolled up in a ball watching 'The Real Housewives of Orange County' all day. -- June Diane Raphael
To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do. -- Maya Angelou
Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum. -- Tracy Chevalier
If there are a couple of adjectives people use to describe me, anger is usually in there. I've never taken that as criticism. It's the way I naturally communicate. But I'm not faux-angry, like Lewis Black, or angry like a gun-toting crazy person. I'm just angry in a mild way - it's not like I'm going to do anything about it. -- David Cross
Eschew all those beastly adjectives... -- Roald Dahl
Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives -- Alfred de Musset
Moods are adjectives of the grammar of life. -- Raheel Farooq
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude. -- Mary Oliver
His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives. -- Frank Herbert
I'm proud of the two adjectives, superficial and frivolous. -- Jeanloup Sieff
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing -- Norman Mailer
Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives. -- Paul Valery
diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives. -- Florence Nightingale
Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives. -- Lois Lowry
But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives. -- Margaret Atwood
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'. -- Franz Kafka
Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework. -- Angela Davis
Every team has kind of a style or adjectives people use to describe the game that the team plays. -- Rachel Martin
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous." -- William Zinsser
I know I look good. The regular adjectives that come my way - sexy, hot, dusky, bong bombshell I love them. -- Bipasha Basu
Prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm's length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives. -- Elinor Glyn
I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies. -- Katharine Fullerton Gerould
They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs... -- Lewis Carroll
Bad sign when the thought of your x-girlfriend sends you reeling in a search for new adjectives to describe stupidity and thoughtlessness? -- Dov Davidoff
It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament. -- Henry Theodore Tuckerman
For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October. -- Hal Borland
To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time." -- Gregory Bateson
People have only two or three adjectives to describe people in the public eye. And that's okay. As long as those adjectives aren't train wreck, mess, terrible. -- Taylor Swift
I despise all adjectives that try to describe people as liberal or conservative, rightist or leftist, as long as they stay in the useful part of the road. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic... -- Bill Gaede
I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days. -- Carl Sandburg
Amazing, powerful, inspirational - those adjectives might make me sound like a fawning fan, but REWORK is that useful. Be prepared for a new feeling of clarity and motivation. -- Kathy Sierra
The adjectives that are in the book ["Win"] - passion, persuasion, persistence, perfection, prioritization, being people-centered - none of them are as important as principles. Without principles, the language will fail. -- Frank Luntz
When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff. -- P. G. Wodehouse
The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs. -- Elizabeth Hardwick
In my opinion, using different kinds of epithets and adjectives in connection with the word democracy is a sign of mere hypocrisy, to put it mildly. Either there's democracy, or there isn't. -- Garry Kasparov
Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. -- Ezra Pound

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