Jessica St. Clair Quotes

You've got to write for your audience.

I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

You've got to know someone pretty well to hate them.

Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

It sometimes is better to write in a more directed, focused way when the pages are aimed at something already, a mission statement or a basic spine that represents the theme or the concept that you've agreed on, and writing partners are great for that because you can sit there until you get it.

Those who write clearly have readers.

Paul and I know each other on a lot of different levels that very few people know about.

Rapport is the ultimate tool for producing results with other people. No matter what you want in your life, if you can develop rapport with the right people, you'll be able to fill their needs, and they will be able to fill yours.

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

If the reader doesn't understand what you're saying, you're talking to yourself.

He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle: to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.

In general, I think audiences are a lot smarter than people think. So, it's not "know your audience", it's "respect your audience, and really know your content".

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

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

And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole.

The audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves.

The use of the right word, the exact word, is the difference between a pencil with a sharp point and a thick crayon.

I think nobody wants to hear a sermon. Well, some people do, but maybe not through music or not with me. No one wants to hear me give a speech that way.

I'm a stranger," pointed out Bod. "You're not," she said, definitely. "You're a little boy." And then she said, "And you're my friend. So you can't be a stranger.