Quotes About Writing Clearly

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

Anthony Trollope

#2. I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.

Ruth Ozeki

#3. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision.

Dale Carnegie

#4. Muscovites see clearly but write muddily; the eye grasps but the fingers splay.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

#5. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.

William Zinsser

#6. The best writing reflects the author's ideas and communicates them clearly to the reader.

Steve Dunham

#7. The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out in his writings about both thinkers, both modes are present.

Philip Kitcher

#8. Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!

Kailin Gow

#9. In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there's some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it's mediated by a kind of text - there's an electricity about it.

David Foster Wallace

#10. It was a day-by-day record of a Guild much younger and smaller than the current one. After several pages, she had grown fond of the record-keeper, who clearly admired the people he was writing about.

Trudi Canavan

#11. The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#12. I imagine them very clearly and then attempt to describe what I can see. Sometimes I draw them for my own amusement! (talking about her characters and scenes)

J.K. Rowling

#13. Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I'll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won't even write it down.

Murong Xuecun

#14. To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

Deb Caletti

#15. Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

Michelle M. Pillow

#16. I clearly remember writing songs [when I was young] and the power that it gave me of feeling like somebody. My whole life changed when I wrote those songs, even before anyone ever heard them. It wasn't a commercial thing.

Gwen Stefani

#17. I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain.

Arthur Bradford

#18. If I'm feeling confident, then I write confident, happy, or assured music. I can hear some early electronic sketches I did where I'm clearly not confident and everything's a bit mid-range, nothing really pushes through.

Anna Meredith

#19. You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Katherine Anne Porter

#20. It is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.

Mark Dintenfass

#21. I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble.

R.A. Lafferty

#22. The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

E.B. White

#23. Loads of weirdos send me things, like strange bits of leather. And then there was the guy who thought I was having his baby. Apparently, he's been writing to Princess Anne too, so I clearly belong to a good, erm, sub-section of society.

Konnie Huq

#24. The writing was so clearly written on the wall about me, but I didn't see it. I had no role models. I didn't know there was even a possibility of being gay. I battled with it, but this was the way God made me. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the man upstairs.

Bryan Batt

#25. Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

Kim Hyesoon

#26. Read critically, write consciously; speak clearly; tell your truth!

Clint Smith

#27. There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

Peter Singer

#28. Clearly, we're supposed to be together. If this were the internet, seventeen-year-old girls would be writing slash fiction about us as we speak.

Vaughn R. Demont

#29. "Who are we to say what is right and what is wrong?" is the common refrain under the doctrine of pure pluralism. Clearly, society cannot long survive if this principle is pushed to its logical conclusion and everyone is free to write his own laws.

Benjamin Hart

#30. I don't have to write jokes. I don't have to write insults. If you ask the man of the hour in the hot seat, my mere existence is clearly insult enough.

Rachael Ray

#31. I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended.

Christopher Darden

#32. The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.

Mark Twain

#33. The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

Sean O Faolain

#34. I don't teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch - that's a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids - even when they're tired, even when they're bouncing off the walls.

Rick Riordan

#35. People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?

Ai Weiwei

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

Matthew Arnold

#37. Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly
about any subject at all.

William Zinsser

#38. My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

Pattiann Rogers

#39. Wow, Cross. I think you missed your calling. Screw demon hunting: you should clearly be writing Hallmark cards.

Rachel Hawkins

#40. Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.

S.I. Hayakawa

#41. No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.

Carl Hiaasen

#42. I like writing fiction better than anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words.

Shirley Jackson

#43. Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

Russell Baker

#44. People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#45. 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.

Bill Bryson

#46. But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was.

Jeffrey Rosen

#47. I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.

Steve Capus

#48. . . .poetry by Eliot. There's a lulling thing in his voice that makes me feel as if a spell has been cast that shall wake us all so that we might fly out of the mirror and speak to each other clearly at last.

Louisa Hall

#49. I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly

Ulysses S. Grant

#50. I'm clearly most well known for my music. Eventually, ultimately, I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.

Alanis Morissette

#51. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)

David McCullough

#52. If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language.

Hilaire Belloc

#53. I'm just coming out and I'm going to clearly be myself - I write what I feel, I never worry what others think.

Avril Lavigne

#54. The central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.

Fareed Zakaria

#55. When we read our own writing, we all think it clearly expresses what we mean, because when we read it, we are only reminding ourselves of what we had in mind when we wrote it.

Joseph Williams

#56. The secret to productive goal setting is in establishing clearly defined goals, writing them down and then focusing on them several times a day with words, pictures and emotions as if we've
already achieved them.

Denis Waitley

#57. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

Anne Lamott

#58. If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Kurt Vonnegut

#59. What I've learned most clearly from blogs is that the majority of them write about the problems from the outside for a reason - because they are missing the abilities that allow people to move to the inside.

Ryan Holiday

#60. Speak up and speak clearly. I want to hear what you have to say because it matters. Let's listen to each other and respect one another's opinions. Although, they may be different, wisdom allows us to be responsible for our own feelings and actions.

Felicia Johnson

#61. I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

Ann Hood

#62. You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

David McCullough

#63. When you imagine and clearly articulate your goals in writing, you access the creative energy of your right brain. Imagination and creativity allow you to find solutions to problems that were not previously available to you and give your left brain an opportunity to be receptive to new ideas.

Julie Connor

#64. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Julian Barnes

#65. Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

A.S. Byatt

#66. It is not possible to write clearly enough to avoid being misrepresented by people who are sufficiently determined to do so.

Karl Popper

#67. [Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.

Rachel Carson

#68. We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#69. I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem.

Matthea Harvey

#70. Clearly the work of a master teacher who has deep knowledge of his subject and enormous empathy for his students and his readers.

Betty Edwards

#71. My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.

Gene Wolfe

#72. I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

Skylar Grey

#73. Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.

Jeff Zentner

#74. It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. I

Flannery O'Connor

#75. I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

Gayle Forman

#76. Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

Abraham Lincoln

#77. Be obscure clearly.

E.B. White

#78. Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

Georg C. Lichtenberg