Adjectives

nevver: “Adjectives are frequently the greatest enemy of the substantive.” - Voltaire “[I was taught] to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.” - Ernest Hemingway “The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.” - Clifton Paul Fadiman “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 close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.” - Mark Twain “The road to hell is paved with adjectives.” - Stephen King “[The adjective] is the one part of speech first seized upon and worked to death by novices and inferior writers.” - J.I. Rodale “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” - Ezra Pound “The adjective has not been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” - E.B. White “[Whoever writes in English] is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective.” - George Orwell “Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun.” - William Zissner