You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.
Interpretation
Strive for clarity in writing through rigorous effort.
Fran Lebowitz suggests that the effort put into making writing challenging for oneself will result in clearer and more accessible writing for the reader. By confronting and overcoming difficulties in the writing process, the writer sharpens their ability to communicate effectively, ultimately benefiting the audience.
In practice
In a workshop on writing techniques, this quote could inspire aspiring authors to refine their craft.
Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.
Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.
Children who have an education grow up to lead healthier lives - earn higher income, take better care of their families, contribute to their economies.
Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired- any problem which he has himself solved, becomes, by virtue of the conquest, much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a schoolbook, can be registered.
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
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