“The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.”

— Clive Staples Lewis

As quoted in part 2 of Sherwood Eliot Wirt in "The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis" (1963) http://www1.cbn.com/narnia/the-final-interview-of-c.-s.-lewis

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Clive Staples Lewis272

Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist 1898–1963

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955) [p. 237]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

A Joy for Ever, note 6 (1857)

“Our words go beyond the moon.
Our words go into the shadows.
The river sings the endlessness.
We write of our journey through night.
We write in our aloneness.
We want to know the shape of eternity.
Who knows the way it is?
Who knows what time will not tell us?”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

“It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written.”

Leo Strauss book Persecution and the Art of Writing

Source: Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, p. 144

“Like I say, the way I write songs is, you know, inspirational. I have to wait for it to happen. And when it happens I get lines, and I just write them down, you know. I'm not sort of a Tin Pan Alley sort of songwriter. I just sort of write down what I get - without censoring or questioning what it is and what it means, you know. Like later on I look at what it means, but not at the time.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

"Nights in Copenhagen with Van Morrison" (1985) interview by Al Jones

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Truth of Intercourse.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1801-01-03) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“[On his process for writing novels:] I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

A modern novelist of Dickensian tradition, Spotlight, Russia Today, January 24, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ost0Gyl2V1I,

“Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Physics and Philosophy (1958)
Context: Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like "existence" and "space and time". Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections. This is actually the fact when the concepts become part of a system of axioms and definitions which can be expressed consistently by a mathematical scheme. Such a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way in this field. But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely.

“The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 118 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

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