I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

Elmore Leonard (1925–2013), celebrated for his lean crime fiction and sharp dialogue, often explained his style as a deliberate resistance to “showy” prose and slow exposition. The remark “I try to leave out the parts that people skip” is widely quoted from interviews in which Leonard discussed his revision process and his preference for momentum—scenes that move, dialogue that reveals character, and description kept on a tight leash. It aligns with the practical advice he later codified in his well-known “rules of writing,” which emphasize avoiding clutter, minimizing adverbs, and keeping the reader turning pages.

The line is a compact statement of Leonard’s reader-centered aesthetic: good writing is not the accumulation of “literary” effects but the disciplined removal of anything that doesn’t earn attention. It implies that boredom is often structural—caused by indulgent backstory, generic description, or self-conscious phrasing—and that revision is largely subtraction. The quote also gestures toward Leonard’s broader philosophy of storytelling as performance: every paragraph must justify its place by creating tension, character, or forward motion. In that sense, it’s both a craft maxim and a moral stance against wasting the reader’s time.