Quotes About Conciseness

If I had more time, I would have written less.

Poor or fuzzy communications are major time-wasters. Take the time to be crystal-clear in your communications with others.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

When you straddle a thing it takes a long time to explain it.

Desvarío empobrecedor el de querer escribir novelas, el de querer explayar en quinientas páginas algo que se puede formular en una sola frase».

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.

To speak much is one thing; to speak to the point another!

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences.

Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much.

Wisdom is made up of ten parts—nine of which are silence, and the tenth is brevity of language. A

The Less I Say The More My Work Gets Done.

Poem, novel, essay, play—everything seems too long. The writer—it is his function—always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words.

Space has failed us, and we must be unmeaningly brief.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

The best text slides convey their message as starkly and simply as possible. They do not waste words (or slides) on transitional or introductory points, which can and should be stated orally. This means of course that the slides by themselves will not be intelligible as a handout to someone who has not attended the presentation.

The thing that's cool about the recording booth is that it's so perfunctory, so cut-to-the-chase.

I get so carried away in interviews and deliver 1,500-word treatises, then find it's been reduced to something pithier but also not quite accurate. Although I imagine there are people I work with who wish they could edit me every day.

I never want to confuse people or go over their heads.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.