P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

Jargon is part ceremonial robe, part false beard.

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

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

George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

The minute you read something and you can't understand it, you can be sure it was written by a lawyer. Then, if you give it to another lawyer to read and he don't know just what it means, then you can be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. If it's in a few words and is plain, and understandable only one way, it was written by a non-lawyer.

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.

You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely

We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous.

Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.

Complexity is the enemy of clarity

Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Unexplained, obscure matters are regarded as more important than explained, clear ones.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

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.

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.