Sherwood Anderson Quotes

I am never as clear about any matter as when I have finished writing about it.

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. ... For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words.

Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.

I like to know how I'm supposed to feel about things. Just a little clue or hint.

I'm not a confused person in real life. I'm very clear.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

You have to have some kind of clarity or understanding of what's happening to write.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

He who would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind to see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible.

I think writing for anybody helps you order your life. It helps you arrange your emotions and your thoughts and it helps to provide perspective.

Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.

If you realize early what your influence is, you can have a better understanding of what you are writing about.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

I do not know if you have ever noticed that the more you struggle to understand, the less you understand any problem. But, the moment you cease to struggle and let the problem tell you the whole story, give all its significance - then there is understanding, which means, obviously, that to understand, the mind must be quiet.

I write to discover what I think.

It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

The understanding of some men is clear, that of others brilliant. The former illumines its surroundings; the latter obscures them.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.