What did James Baldwin mean by "as clean as a bone"?

In his interview with The Paris Review, James Baldwin in answer to the question "As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?", says:

You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

The idiom struck me as odd because I'd never come across any such idiom before. This prompted a quick search on the Internet but to no avail.

So what was Baldwin's idea behind the metaphor? I'm guessing he was hinting at some sort of "Occam's razor" applied to writing, as it were— that is, writing should be kept as simple as possible and stripped of any fripperies, like a bone stripped of all flesh. I'm not sure though, and hence the question. But even if that be the case, isn't it a rather poor metaphor considering "stripping a bone clean of its meat" essentially doesn't leave much to savour?

Solution 1:

Baldwin said this in 1984 in an interview with "The Paris Revue"

INTERVIEWER

As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?

BALDWIN

You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Given the context, I am not going to criticise him - I think he had it right. The bone is the bone and nothing more - it is stripped of everything else, save for its strength.

A search for "as clean as a bone" also brings up a song and a book of that title.