Most Readable Quotes & Sayings

Few Westerners understand the post-Soviet soul like Lawrence Sheets. Whether it is his hair-raising stories of the region's myriad armed conflicts or the black humor with which he captures the moral and physical impoverishment of a collapsing empire, Sheets brilliantly condenses twenty tumultuous years into an eminently readable tale. — Matthew Brzezinski

Years ago in 1959 when Dellinger was already an editor on Liberation (then an anarchist-pacifist magazine, of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose) Mailer had submitted a piece, after some solicitation, on the contrast between real obscenity in advertising, and alleged obscenity in four-letter words. The piece was no irreplaceable work of prose, and in fact was eventually inserted quietly into his book, Advertisements for Myself, but it created difficulty for the editorial board at Liberation, since there was a four-letter word he had used to make his point, the palpable four-letter word which signifies a woman's most definitive organ: these editorial anarchists were decorous; they were ready to overthrow society and replace it with a communion of pacifistic men free of all laws, but they were not ready to print cunt. — Norman Mailer

I received a most amusing postcard the other morning. Unfortunately, it was not signed in a readable manner so I cannot answer it privately. But it comes from Moblie, Ala., and says: 'Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: You have not answered my question, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.' I am afraid none of us know how much nor what kind of blood we have in our veins, since chemically it is all the same. And most of us cannot trace our ancestry more than a few generations. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way. — Charles Frazier

women were considered instinctual nurses in this generation - the field had received exciting publicity during the Spanish-American War when an Army Nursing Corps had served overseas in the Philippines. Clara Weeks-Shaw, the author of a popular textbook on nursing, promoted the field as "a new activity for women - congenial, honorable and remunerative and with permanent value to them in the common experience of domestic life."3 In readable language, Weeks-Shaw presented nursing as an artful balance between self-reliance and submission. Overall its practices were an extension of maternity, requiring the classic female behaviors of cheerfulness (to the patients) and obedience (to the doctors). "Never leave a doctor alone with a gynecology patient except at his request," went one injunction. — Jean H. Baker

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one. — Larry Wall

E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a "single sitting" was longer back in his day. But I digress again. — Gabrielle Zevin

When you write a program, think of it primarily as a work of literature. You're trying to write something that human beings are going to read. Don't think of it primarily as something a computer is going to follow. The more effective you are at making your program readable, the more effective it's going to be: You'll understand it today, you'll understand it next week, and your successors who are going to maintain and modify it will understand it. — Donald Knuth

Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. ( ... ) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done. — Adam Nicolson

A masterly analysis of how political interests, economic circumstances, development strategies, and local history have shaped what are surprisingly different versions of the welfare state across the developing world. The authors combine fine-grained country analyses with intelligent use of data, and explain and extend the theory and literature on the modern welfare state. The book is both scholarly and readable. — Nancy Birdsall

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. — George Orwell

The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable. — James Patterson

I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful. — Ed Benguiat

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook), — Bill Bryson

I'm the weird person who completely loved and devoured 'Middlemarch' but who has not finished far shorter and more readable books due to distraction or the fact that by some miracle I am sleeping through the night. — Sally Mann

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable. — Samuel Butler

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens. — Nicholson Baker

All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried. — Joshua Cohen

Text files are readable by countless editors and utilities, are non-proprietary, are easily shared with anyone, and are guaranteed to be readable in the future. — Daniel Goldman

Designing Online Communities is a must-have for anyone designing or researching online communities, particularly for learning. Owens' work is both comprehensive and eminently readable, a sweeping look at the technologies, design patterns, and cultural forms they produce that is both theoretically ambitious and grounded in examples and tools that will help you develop, research, and manage online communities. — Kurt Squire

David Corbett has combined his unique talents as a gifted writer and an extraordinary teacher to create a superb resource on character development. Deftly crafted and impeccably researched, The Art of Character is a thoughtful and insightful book that is immensely readable and practical. — Sheldon Siegel

In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity. — Stephen King

The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired. — Sherry Ortner

Agatha Christie called her books 'yarns'. A good yarn is very readable. — Barbara Bothwell

Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. — Anthony Trollope

What I do instead is I will cheerfully spend literally hours on identifier names: variable names, method names, and so forth, to make my code readable. If you read some expression using these identifiers and it reads like an English sentence, your program is much more likely to be correct, and much easier to maintain. — Joshua Bloch

I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibility is to - as much as possible - interrogate my own truths. This is to say not merely writing what I think is true, but using the writing to turn that alleged truth over and over, to stress-test it, in the aim of producing something readable. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound ... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying. — Michel Hazanavicius

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice. — George Eliot

Most people would rather not hear about the environment because it's scary, so my goal was to write something that was readable so that people would learn a lot and not be so depressed that they would throw the book away. — Alan Weisman

Recently I have been attacked in newspapers by two 'fabulist' writers, as far as I can make out for the ordinariness of the worlds I portray. To which the most obvious reply is that it's all very well writing about elves and dragons and goddesses rising out of the ground and the rest of it--who couldn't do that and make it colorful? (Readable, of course, is another matter...) But writing about pubs and struggling singer-songwriters--well, that's hard work. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet, somehow, I have to persuade you that something is happening somewhere in the hearts and minds of my characters, even though they're just standing there drinking beer and making jokes about Peter Frampton. — Nick Hornby

Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian
if he be a readable historian
is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements. — Agnes Repplier

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable. — Mark Helprin

The Country Doctor Revisited is a fine achievement. Purporting to be an overview of the practice of medicine in rural areas, it is a splendid portrait of the practice of medicine everywhere. The special conditions that prevail in the countryside as opposed to the cities are examined, and each of these is illustrated by a case history that is as compelling as it is informative. It is presented in a highly readable form that would be accessible to the general public as well as to the deliverers of health care. I recommend it most highly. — Richard Selzer

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth. — Gregory Crewdson

I am a product [ ... of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. — C.S. Lewis

More than almost any current book, DTU will wake the reader from his dogmatic slumbers. It is eminently readable, challenging, and provocative. — John Hospers

The Male Factor is the singularly best business book for women I've read in years. This well-researched yet thoroughly readable book is rich with rare insights into how men really see women in the workplace-and how with a few simple adjustments you can even the playing field. — Lois P Frankel

Books are readable drugs. — Carla H. Krueger

Readability of code is now my first priority. It's more important than being fast, almost as important as being correct, but I think being readable is actually the most likely way of making it correct. — Peter Seibel

A work of art does not need an explanation. The work has to speak for itself. The work may be subject to many interpretations, but only one was in the mind of the artist. Some artists say to make the work readable for the public is an artist's responsibility, but I don't agree with that. The only responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self. My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing. — Louise Bourgeois

Once in every few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public's great purse is emptied to secure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that The Licensed Victuallers' Gazette has stated in a two-line review that it is 'readable'. — P.G. Wodehouse

Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good. — Craig Shaw Gardner

I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience. — Adrian Tomine

Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it. — Fred Saberhagen

Lettering creates readable art that comes to life, displaying a quirky, whimsical nature. — Peggy Dean

Exegetical commentaries on the books of the Bible come in all shapes and sizes. Harold Hoehner's new volume on Ephesians has both a distinctive shape and a monumental size. Its value lies in its attention to detail and its full discussion of all relevant and disputed points. The volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students. Not all Hoehner's conclusions will command consent, but he has produced a stout and readable volume that all will turn to for guidance and help. — Ralph P. Martin

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading. — R.A. Lafferty

What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself. — Richard Wagner

If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people. — Graham Joyce

Icon Books has a fine series called "Revolutions in Science." These works are succinct, highly readable, and authoritative. The series includes John Henry's Moving Heaven and Earth: Copernicus and the Solar System (Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001). Henry's book can be read in an afternoon, and, while not as detailed as Kuhn's classic, it tells the story with verve and lucidity. — Howard Margolis

Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone. — Susanna Kearsley

What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A
better football team?"
"Better me."
"What are me?"
"Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws,
but on a more fundamental level."
"I don't get it."
"That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the
same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally
different consciousness from ours. — Neal Stephenson

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible. — Ingmar Bergman

Certainly one quality which nowadays has been best forgotten - and that is why it will take some time yet for my writings to become readable - is essential in order to practise reading as an art - a quality for the exercise of which it is necessary to be a cow, and under no circumstances a modern man! - rumination. SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE, July, 1887. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument. — Larry Wall

The virtue of books is to be readable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown's Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky's Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described - not unjustly - as "the Mozart of psychology." A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church's Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again. — Oliver Sacks