“I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry.”

William Zinsser on the above quote:

I love the instinctive geometry of Matisse’s sentence. Every year I read it to the students in my writing classes. I don’t tell them what it means–how it might apply to their own writing–because I don’t know. I just want them to think about it. Writers get so fixated on the mechanics of writing that they forget how much they can learn from the other arts about line and the uses of empty space. Good writing, like a good watch, should have no unnecessary parts, and that’s what great art shouts at us: Tell the story with no unnecessary parts.

Zinsser’s On Writing Well is the best book on writing I’ve ever read. It changed the way I see writing and reading and everything. Check it out.