Etgar Keret Quotes

I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

Good code is its own best documentation.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

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.

People who want to express themselves effectively can learn a lot from the hard-won concision of the copywriter.

They write them long because they can't write them short.

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

You cannot teach somebody to write a masterpiece, but you can certainly teach them how to improve their writing skills. And you can teach them that they can make their own voices more effective by being able to communicate more clearly and forcefully. It makes people feel more capable when they can write - for instance to make a request - of a politician - and when they are able to receive a reply.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

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

Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired.

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

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.

Plate glass... has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between. I hope that is what is happening when you read this book

Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

Learn to write well, or not to write at all.

The best writing has no lace on its sleeves.