Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will be understood.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

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

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

Plate glass... has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between. I hope that is what is happening when you read this book

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

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.

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

I think what's really hard is making sense and making what you write clear and smooth-flowing.

Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself, might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible.

Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn't mean you've reached them.

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.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.