John Steinbeck Quotes

I am a firm believer that if you can explain it to a kid, you're on the right track.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

If you can't summarize an issue on one page, you don't understand the issue well enough.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

An expert is someone who takes something you already know and makes it sound confusing.

In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.

[Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

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.

It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.

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

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step.

Keep it simple, when you get too complex you forget the obvious.

To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

If we start to dumb down what has been made clear, where does that stop?

When you're first thinking through an idea, it's important not to get bogged down in complexity. Thinking simply and clearly is hard to do.

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

When I look out the window at my backyard, I can't think of anything interesting to ask. I mean, it's green, it's growing-but nothing occurs to me that any concentrated effort of thought could possibly enlighten. Whereas in economic, statistical, or mathematical kinds of things, I can think lots of questions.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.