"The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'"
Read quote
9 likes
Cutting quotes
Cutting
5.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Cutting
Browse quotes that often appear alongside cutting — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Cutting quotes (page 19 of 258)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Our work in global health is about things like cutting childhood deaths, and every year we continue to make progress there."
Read quote
9 likes
"Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God."
Read quote
9 likes
"I can think of a lot better things to do with my hands than to cut them up on the rim of a drum."
Read quote
9 likes
"Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation."
Read quote
9 likes
"Mon cher ami, let's not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!!! Otherwise, we'll be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same precautions as the animal trainer. If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!!"
Read quote
9 likes
"When I'm frustrated that I'm not doing well in a tournament I cut my own hair, just lop it all off. I've probably made a right mess of it, but luckily I wear a cap when I play."
Read quote
9 likes
"How can we extinguish a fire if we don't first cut off the fuel that ignites the inferno?"
Read quote
9 likes
"If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper-middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it."
Read quote
9 likes
"Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express."
Read quote
9 likes
"When you make the film, it's like a chef who works on the meal. After you're working all day in the kitchen and dicing and cutting and putting the sauces on, you don't want to eat it. That's how I always feel about the films. I work on it for a year. I've written it, I've worked with the actors, I've edited, put the music in. I just never want to see it again."
Read quote
9 likes
"Life's fulfillment finds constant obstacles in its path; but those are necessary for the sake of its advance. The stream is saved from the sluggishness of its current by the perpetual opposition of the soil through which it must cut its way. The spirit of fight belongs to the genius of life."
Read quote
9 likes
"A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot."
Read quote
9 likes
"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."
Read quote
9 likes
"Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it."
Read quote
9 likes
"Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body."
Read quote
9 likes
"We are seeing, we have seen in the last figures a significant drop in the number of net migrants coming into the United Kingdom. So we are cutting out abuse, we've restricted the number of economic - non-EU economic migrants. We're cutting out abuse across the student visa system, particularly, and we're having an impact."
Read quote
9 likes
"I don't believe in playing around much with suit cuts. I like a fairly classic shape that gives a man strong shoulders, a fitted waist, and long legs. Classic simplicity always works."
Read quote
9 likes
"Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you."
Read quote
9 likes
"Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences."
Read quote
9 likes