During an interview with the Paris Review, Simenon commented that he kept submitting short stories to the literary editor of Le Matin even after they were repeatedly rejected.

After his last effort, the editor said to him, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.”

“So, I followed [the editor’s] advice. It’s what I do when I write and the main job when I rewrite.”

The interviewer for the Paris Review asked, “What do you mean by too literary? What do you cut out, certain kinds of Words?”

Simenon: Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence wwhich is there just for the sentence. You know you have a beautiful sentence __ cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels, it is to be cut.

Interviewer: Is that the nature of most of your revisions?

Simenon: Almost all of it.

_ Curated by Dennis Mellersh

Source: Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Malcolm Cowley, The Viking Press, 1959