Robert Graves Quotes

Some persons never attain to the happy art of perspicuous expression, and it is equally true that some persons, thro' a mental defect of their own, will judge the most correct and certain language of others to be indefinite and ambiguous.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

You've got to be an observer. And you've got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.

The biggest piece of advice I have is - listen. Don't jump to the answer or what you think the answer is. The more you listen, the more you learn.

I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that.

Journalists like to talk and write and produce, but the most important part of that process is learning how to listen. And that's what makes you a good journalist.

The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

Writing is the litmus paper of thoughtthe very center of schooling.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.

He who writes badly thinks badly

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

The only difference between the failure of a great idea and the success of a medocre idea was the way in which the idea was communicated.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

You have to be precise. You have to be specific, but you want to be accurate. That is first and foremost. You want to be on top of the story, but words do matter.

Mahatma Gandhi I would say had perhaps a greater spiritual quality whereas Winston Churchill had besides the courage, ability and above everything else, the ability to put into words what his people felt so that he could always lead them. And my own husband I think had great patience, which you need in a democracy because you have to come to do fundamental things, you have to have the patience to have people educated; and then I think he had a deep interest in human beings as human beings.

To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

Endeavor to be always patient of the faults and imperfections of others; for thou hast many faults and imperfections of thine own that require forbearance. If thou art not able to make thyself that which thou wishest, how canst thou expect to mold another in conformity to thy will?