Clarity of Expression Quotes

I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people's relationships and interactions. I don't want language to get in the way of that. It's quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.

Whatever advice you give, be brief.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on.

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

We find few disputes, that are not founded on some ambiguity in the expression [thereof].

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

Sometimes it is necessary to make things clearer than the truth.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

One of the lessons I think nearly all women need to learn, is, that when we are dealing with busy people, no matter how much interested we may be in a subject, we must put what we have to say in the briefest possible form. This is even more important if the person to whom we are talking is listening because of our interest and not because of his own. We may be able to impart some of our enthusiasm to him, if we do not first bore him to death and make him impatient because he is being asked to listen to too many words.

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.

How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood.

For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

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

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

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.

What is conceived well is expressed clearly.