In his book, Blindness, Jose Saramago, drops a quote or two about writing. This is one of my favourites:

You are a writer, you have...an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.

p. 292, Saramago, Jose. Blindness . Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, 1999. Translated by Juan Sager, 1997.