Adjectives

“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