“Most writers have no other quality than the reader: taste. But the latter has the better taste, because he does not write - and the best if he does not read.”

— Karl Kraus

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

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Karl Kraus 94

Czech playwright and publicist 1874–1936

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

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“I know what he means: the taste of language that is only spoken and never written because the speaker most likely doesn't read or write. My father has it, too.”

Rigoberto González (1970) American writer

Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006)

“The writer has a fundamental responsibility to write well or to write the best he can, because if he doesn’t he’s not a writer. And when a writer writes, he’s always referring to a social and historical context…”

Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) Cuban poet/novelist/playwright

Source: On a writer’s responsibility in “The Literature of Uprootedness: An Interview with Reinaldo Arenas” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-literature-of-uprootedness-an-interview-with-reinaldo-arenas in The New Yorker (2013 Dec 5)

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Hemingway's famous iceberg theory of writing.
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16

“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

“Hee drinkes misery, and he tastes happinesse; he mowes misery, and he gleanes happinesse; he journeys in misery, he does but walke in happinesse.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Meditation 13
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

“That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Preface
Lacon (1820)

“If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Book II, ch. 18.
Discourses

“I like long and unusual words, and anybody who does not share my tastes is not compelled to read me.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967)
Context: I like long and unusual words, and anybody who does not share my tastes is not compelled to read me. Policemen and politicians are under some obligation to make themselves comprehensible to the intellectually stunted, but not I. Let my prose be tenebrous and rebarbative; let my pennyworth of thought be muffled in gorgeous habilements; lovers of Basic English will look to me in vain.

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

“Most writers have no other quality than the reader: taste. But the latter has the better taste, because he does not write - and the best if he does not read.”

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