C. S. Lewis Quotes

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

Multitudes of words are neither an argument of clear ideas in the writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear notions to the reader.

What is conceived well is expressed clearly.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

If you can find interesting ways to be clear, you're really onto something.

Clarity of communication is important.

The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

Whate'er is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.

Aphorisms may equivocate, but they must not wobble.

Whatever is clearly expressed is well wrote.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

If we are understood, more words are unnecessary; if we are not likely to be understood, they are useless.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.

I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.