Readable Quotes

#1. Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

Brian Kernighan

#2. More than almost any current book, DTU will wake the reader from his dogmatic slumbers. It is eminently readable, challenging, and provocative.

John Hospers

#3. Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.

Susanna Kearsley

#4. David Corbett has combined his unique talents as a gifted writer and an extraordinary teacher to create a superb resource on character development. Deftly crafted and impeccably researched, The Art of Character is a thoughtful and insightful book that is immensely readable and practical.

Sheldon Siegel

#5. In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction.

Kathleen Rooney

#6. Books are readable drugs.

Carla H. Krueger

#7. Of all needs a book has,
the chief need is to be readable.

Anthony Trollope

#8. Text files are readable by countless editors and utilities, are non-proprietary, are easily shared with anyone, and are guaranteed to be readable in the future.

Daniel Goldman

#9. All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.

Joshua Cohen

#10. The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.

James Patterson

#11. The aim of the Constitutional treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable ... The Constitution aimed to be clear, whereas this treaty had to be unclear. It is a success.

Karel De Gucht

#12. Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable.

Anthony Trollope

#13. E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a "single sitting" was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

Gabrielle Zevin

#14. I'm a long-time fan of Rob Long, and his books are hugely re-readable, detailing the ins and outs of being a Hollywood comedy writer with a past success but with everything to prove.

Danny Wallace

#15. In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends ... Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

Darryl Pinckney

#16. Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul's research is extraordinary; his writing is taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure,

Debby Applegate

#17. Agatha Christie called her books 'yarns'. A good yarn is very readable.

Barbara Bothwell

#18. Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.

Herbert Bayer

#19. Writing can be either readable or precise, but not at the same time.

Bertrand Russell

#20. Clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

Rae Armantrout

#21. The Male Factor is the singularly best business book for women I've read in years. This well-researched yet thoroughly readable book is rich with rare insights into how men really see women in the workplace-and how with a few simple adjustments you can even the playing field.

Lois P Frankel

#22. Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn't mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage; it means strong, simple, natural sentences.

Laurence D'Orsay

#23. Susan Campbell has brought Isabella's fascinating forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant readable prose style of a veteran journalist.

Debby Applegate

#24. Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

Larry Wall

#25. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

Julian Barnes

#26. Long Gone is the type of book that should come with a warning. It's a compulsively readable, highly addictive story. The ending will leave you breathless.

Karin Slaughter

#27. Type should be beautiful - Screw readable!

Ed Benguiat

#28. The virtue of books is to be readable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#29. Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

R.A. Lafferty

#30. The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#31. Lettering creates readable art that comes to life, displaying a quirky, whimsical nature.

Peggy Dean

#32. The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.

Mark Helprin

#33. Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

Nicholson Baker

#34. Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State displays Lisa Borders' emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing way of life.

Christopher Castellani

#35. Free Speech in the College Community is a very timely book written by a dedicated scholar of the First Amendment. Challenging and readable it should be studied by all academicians, students, legislators and lawyers.

Nancy Kassebaum

#36. Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Barbara Tuchman

#37. She was indeed the literature I thought she would be, on par with excellence and not-so-readable.

Kavipriya Moorthy

#38. I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.

Adrian Tomine

#39. Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.

Craig Shaw Gardner

#40. Robert Glennon is a leading-edge legal scholar and passionate water advocate whose thinking is central to an intense debate on the path forward to a water-secure world. I heartily recommend his provocative, information-packed, and highly readable new book Unquenchable.

Maude Barlow

#41. We must carefully consider card security solutions, such as adding photographs or machine-readable electronic strips, so to prevent further breaches of individual privacy that could result from changes to the design of Social Security Cards.

Ron Lewis

#42. It's meant to be seen rolling so it should be big and readable. Wildstyles on trains didn't make much sense to me when I first started and they still don't today.

Ichabod

#43. Highly readable, compelling analysis of America's current political crises

Craig Barnes

#44. The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets.

Biz Stone

#45. I'm the weird person who completely loved and devoured 'Middlemarch' but who has not finished far shorter and more readable books due to distraction or the fact that by some miracle I am sleeping through the night.

Sally Mann

#46. I'm not interested in being easy anymore. Readable, yes. Easy, no.

George Murray

#47. I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Samuel Butler

#48. Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.

Fred Saberhagen

#49. Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so.

Jimmy Wales

#50. When the Transportation Security Administration adopted body scanners at airports, activists wrote the Fourth Amendment on their underwear in metallic paint readable by the new devices.

Dana Priest

#51. Readability of code is now my first priority. It's more important than being fast, almost as important as being correct, but I think being readable is actually the most likely way of making it correct.

Peter Seibel

#52. A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now
LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#53. The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.

Saul Bass

#54. Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

Gregory Crewdson

#55. The things that separate the planes are the incisions and the edges of the matter. Each separate layer of cutting or painting is visible and readable as an edge.

Ellen Gallagher

#56. I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

Ingmar Bergman

#57. Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

Charles Frazier

#58. Most people would rather not hear about the environment because it's scary, so my goal was to write something that was readable so that people would learn a lot and not be so depressed that they would throw the book away.

Alan Weisman

#59. Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

E. M. Forster

#60. If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

Larry Wall

#61. Readable, faithful, accurate-what more could you ask for in a modern translation of the Bible? GOD'S WORD Translation is a great version for enhancing your love for God's Word. I recommend it.

Ann Spangler

#62. If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.

Graham Joyce

#63. I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.

Ed Benguiat

#64. Ben m'boy," Jubal said gently, "as a reporter you are hard-working and sometimes readable.

Robert A. Heinlein

#65. Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook),

Bill Bryson

#66. Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

Robert C. Martin

#67. Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone.

Susanna Kearsley

#68. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.

George Orwell

#69. It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound ... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying.

Michel Hazanavicius