Frank Zappa Quotes

Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn't mean you've reached them.

Avoid miscommunication. The price you pay for it is horrendous.

You have to think not about what you mean but about what people hear.

Those who talk loudly are rarely listened to.

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.

Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions.

Easy reading requires hard writing.

You cannot explain to someone who comes with no idea of what you are talking about without being misunderstood.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

The audience goes to sleep really quickly! If you have a slight pause at the wrong time, that's it!

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

I think I became a better writer after I started writing for the New Yorker. Well, I know I did. And part of it was having my New Yorker editor and part of it is that was when I started really going on tour and reading things in front of an audience 30 times and then going back in the room and rewriting it and reading it and rewriting it. So you really get the rhythm of the sentences down and you really get the flow down and you get rid of stuff that's not important.

You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.

We have a reading, a talking, and a writing public. When shall we have a thinking?

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

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.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.