Nigel Hamilton Quotes

If you can't make yourself understood by your friends, you'll be in trouble when your enemies come for you.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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

The longing we have to communicate cleanly and directly with people is always obstructed by qualifications and often with concern about how our messages will be received.

A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.

I just—we were talking, and we fell asleep. I swear, we didn’t, um—’’ ‘‘Yeah, you’d better not have ummed.

That is not good language which all understand not.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else.

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

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.

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

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

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

Those who write clearly have readers.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.

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.

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.