Wallace Stegner Quotes

I preferred the simplest vocabulary.

If we are understood, more words are unnecessary; if we are not likely to be understood, they are useless.

I don't feel like I have to use big words or theories to get my point across. People are like, "Whoa. That's crazy" and make it into this crazy thing.

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

What isn’t clear, isn’t French.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

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.

Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts.

I'm interested in locating the holy grail of the minimum means to express the most complex ideas.

The most important thing is to have something important to say and finding the means to say it.

If you can find interesting ways to be clear, you're really onto something.

Clarity of communication is important.

Whate'er is well conceived is clearly said, And the words to say it flow with ease.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

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.

People get upset and it becomes an excuse to treat other people a certain way,but if you really step back, you realize what you've left behind.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?

You'll always love the person, if you're sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can't figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

For the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the mind, English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world.

The way we treat people we disagree with most is a report card on what we've learned about love.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

I'm thankful for some of bad experiences I've had. They helped me with the way I view people and see them for who they really are.