Jason Schwartzman Quotes

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

With great writing, there is great clarity.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

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

When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

I'm not an angry person. When I write, the lawyer in me tries to make it as easy to read as possible.

A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

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

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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

I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.

Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first,--to be intelligently simple.

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.

I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

One can only continue to expect to be read if one omits everything that is unimportant.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

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.