Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

People who think well, write well

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

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

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.

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?

Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

Once something is well-written, then everything else is gravy.

I like how I write better than how I speak.

Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

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

Thinking clearly and effectively is the greatest asset of any human being. We are constantly reminded that the one superiority that man has over other animals is the ability to think. It is primarily our ability to think that sets us apart from other animals.

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.

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

Minds are of three kinds: one is capable of thinking for itself; another is able to understand the thinking of others; and a third can neither think for itself nor understand the thinking of others. The first is of the highest excellence, the second is excellent, and the third is worthless.

Defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds; I am apt to think, the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them.

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

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.