Tony DiTerlizzi Quotes

The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.

Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

Every day I run into people who don't know what I do. And even after I explain it they still don't know what I do. So now I can just say, 'Pick up the Locas book!' And that tells them all.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

I labor to be brief, and manage to be obscure.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.

There are things that don't deserve to be said briefly.

If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.