Quotes About Explicitness

Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language.

There is an explicit way to define what explicit is.

articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid;

Broadly speaking, the thing you need to avoid is the general as contrasted with the particular (reptile creates a less vivid image than does rattler); the vague as contrasted with the definite (them guys is less meaningful than those three hoods who hang out at Sammy's poolroom); and the abstract as contrasted with the concrete (to say that something is red tells me less than to state that it's exactly the color of the local fire truck).

The novelist's job is to] make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Third, the purpose is to be described as concretely as possible, not abstractly.

The idea that sex can be reduced to fixed components as it is in pornography—blow job, doggie style, money shot, girl-on-girl—is adolescent: first base, second base, all the way. It is ironic that we think of this as adult entertainment. I don't see why we should regard porn as a way to enjoy "sexuality in all of its explicitness" any more than we consider looking at a chart of the food pyramid to be a feast.

explicit communiqu

Ambiguity goes just so far and no further.

I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.

I try not to shy away from specificity.

My statements and actions are pretty clear.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague. —Freeman Dyson

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

Get to the bloody point!' She

Being vague is the enemy of a good label.

Although we may deplore the film's scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.

In general, simple is better than complex, explicit is better than implicit, and full statements are better than arcane expressions.

The only guaranteed way to make something not very funny is to make it vague.

Written language is conducive to critical thinking because it is stable and explicit. Speech, by contrast, is evanescent. Written lines of reasoning can be pondered, discussed, dissected, and critiqued so that the reader can in some sense rise above the text, judge it, and keep the very best ideas—those that pass scrutiny.

Barack Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this country that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that we haven't seen since the height of the civil rights movement. Trump

subtlety sometimes eludes me. Why not just hit the nail on the head?