Quotes About Clarity

It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas

What would be worse than being born blind? She replied, To have sight without vision.

It is an unspeakable boon to me to be able to speak in winged words that need no interpretation.

Let the most romantic of us that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, re-combine it in the morning and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so coherent, when it came under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded, and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

When I use the word 'buzz' in successive sentences, it's clearly time for me to stop writing.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

You have days where you're trying to be your best, and you say something, and you see it being written in three different places and in a way that you didn't mean for it to be interpreted. But you just try to do your best. You kind of just have to let everything else roll off your back.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

If you look on Amazon - if you do a search for personal finance, there are literally 20,000 books written on personal finance, and there's no real reason for it. I mean, personal finance is pretty simple.

A dream doesn't become a goal until it is written.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

When I'm writing, it's because I'm trying to figure something out for myself. If I don't believe in what I've written, then how can I expect anyone else to believe in that, either?

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

A lot has been written about Tony Perkins and myself and I figured, Let's get it straight. I had a relationship with Tony for two to three years, but those are only threads in the tapestry of my whole life.

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

I don't believe there's two sides to every story. It's black and white. There's right and wrong.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.