“Write a Sentence as Clean as a Bone” And Other Advice from James Baldwin
James Baldwin on the difficulty of change:
“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
James Clear • 3-2-1: On copying best practices, being underestimated, and the difficulty of change | James Clear
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adul
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Writer James Baldwin on hate as a defense mechanism: "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
II.
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been ali
... See moreVigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the
William Strunk JR. and E.B. White • The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
ago—the craft of writing as the art of thinking.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.