Alfred Jarry Quotes

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

When our minds as people normally starts to wrap around things, we start to attach all these ideas to it that really aren't that necessary to the core of it, if you just experience it and kind of go through it.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

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.

He who would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind to see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible.

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Making noise is easy; making stuff people understand is an easy thing to do.

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.

You've got to guard against speaking more clearly than you think.

A full mind is an empty bat.

There is nothing clever about confusion.

I just like it when I can understand things, and the simpler it is, the easier it is to understand.

If your own mind is muddled, much more will the minds of your hearers be confused.

He never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile.

To understand is hard. Once one understands, action is easy.

Nothing is confused except the mind.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.

Definite speech means clarity of mind.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.