Tanith Lee Quotes

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.

The more clearly you write, the more easily and surely you will be understood.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

We printed all the words out because otherwise nobody would be able to understand them.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it.

We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

My books are easy to read. No folderol.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

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.

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

I think in most cases, unless you're writing about a character who is garrulous, you say what you've got to say and then get out. Those little conjunctions, those little turnaround words help you do it. That's the way I like to write: I get rid of things rather than add them.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

i can't understand her" well son, you might as well try to understand the sun". derived form the book:fires of heaven by robert jordan.

Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.

I don't want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of voice production, Jeeves, I said, but I must inform you that that 'Well, sir' of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your 'Indeed, sir?