Communication Quote by John Rutherford

“While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.”

— Martin Amis

“Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The…

— George Orwell

“He said if I warn’t so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was…

— Mark Twain

“Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not…

— John Kennedy Toole

“Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours (A good sketch is better than a long speech)”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of…

— John Burnside

“Even with my focused intention to be eloquent and reflect perfect grammar, syntax, and punctuation in my writing, I still flub up occasionally. Thank…

— Susan C. Young

“Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were…

— Christopher Prendergast

An author should be delighted, not annoyed when he hears himself persistently misquoted. He could receive no higher compliment. It proves that the world…

— Hesketh Pearson

“Wittgenstein's language has the singularly rare quality of being both colloquial and painstakingly precise.”

— Ray Monk

“When an author took the time and trouble to choose exactly the right words and arrange them in the right order, there was a…

— Sophie Hannah