“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” STEPHEN KING
Illustration: New Yorker cartoon by Charles Barsotti, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” STEPHEN KING
Illustration: New Yorker cartoon by Charles Barsotti, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
DUSTIN HOFFMAN (as Sam Daniels): Alarmingly high fatality. All localized within a three mile radius. Incubation period: short. Appears contained. Alarmingly. Casey, you didn’t put “alarmingly.”
KEVIN SPACEY (as Casey Schuler): It’s an adverb, Sam. It’s a lazy tool of a weak mind.
From the movie Outbreak (1995), screenplay by Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool
Note: For more on adverbs, see “Why the Adverb Is Not Our Friend” by Richard Nordquist at About.com.
“In order to write good stuff you have to hate adverbs.”
THEODORE ROETHKE
(winner, Pulitzer Prize & National Book Award for poetry)
as quoted in The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke
by Allan Seager
Illustration: Jill Blackmore, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day…fifty the day after that…and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s–GASP!!–too late.”
From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) by STEPHEN KING.
Photo Illustration: Halifax Light, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Silver Birch Press 