Writing with Clarity Quotes

I'm not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.

When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

I didn't want to do a book just to do a book. I wanted to do a book that, if you should read it, you might take one thing from it. Until that was clear in my mind, I wasn't going to do one.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

The best thing to do when you're writing is to write about something you know instead of pretending. I mean, you can do that too, obviously, but when you write from your heart, it works so much better.

I am never going to write for the sake of writing.

I get to tell the most interesting stories I know how to tell with the most interesting sentences I know how to compose - and people who aren't related to me read them. To be paid to write things that matter to me is extraordinary.

You have to keep your audience in your mind; if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that; otherwise, you end up preaching down. You need to listen not so much to the audience but to the story itself.

I don't like writing with real people in mind.

You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.

You can only really write about what you know about.

I sit a lot with my lyrics - I don't write just to write or put a line in just to have one. Everything has to mean something to me.

I think humor can be an effective way of getting the point across, but there are definitely times where I just write very earnestly.