David Longstreth Quotes

Multitudes of words are neither an argument of clear ideas in the writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear notions to the reader.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

It's important to me that my songs actually make sense. So often, I turn on the radio, and I have no idea what the people are singing about. It may sound good, but when you listen, they're just saying words that rhyme. It's another song about nothing.

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

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

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

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

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.

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

I'm not trying to be cosmic, it's just that everything's on a roll and that's how it is. The songs within the album discuss that very condition.

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

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

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.

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.

Definite speech means clarity of mind.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

Whatever we well understand we express clearly, and words flow with ease.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.