Beliefs Quote by Zadie Smith

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

— Samuel Johnson

“What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's…

— Meghan Daum

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to…

— George Orwell

“A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness--"Truth," "Knowers," "the Good," "Man"--but we can by no means deny…

— Saul Bellow

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

— Anne Stevenson

“Having said that the unliterary reader attends to the words too little to make anything like a full use of them, I must notice…

— C.S. Lewis

“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

French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.

— Edward Sapir

“This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public…

— John Ralston Saul

When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.

— Thomas Jefferson

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly…

— Plato