A Quote by Evariste Galois
An author never does more damage to his readers than when he hides a difficulty.
Related Quotes
Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.
Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
Secrecy in science does not work. Withholding information does more damage to us than to our competitors.
Who, adult or child, is Michael Jackson truly close to? What and who is he trying to flee? What's the nature of the psychic damage he has so clearly sustained? I suspect his racial identity is more a byproduct of that damage than the primal cause.
The narrative image has more dimensions than the painted image - literature is more complex than painting. Initially, this complexity represents a disadvantage, because the reader has to concentrate much more than when they're looking at a canvas. It gives the author, on the other hand, the opportunity to feel like a creator: they can offer their readers a world in which there's room for everyone, as every reader has their own reading and vision.
Whether the author intended a symbolic resonance to exist in her book is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it's there. Because the book does not exist for the benefit of the author, the book exists for the benefit of YOU. If we as readers can have a bigger and richer experience with the world as a result of reading a symbol and that symbol wasn't intended by the author, WE STILL WIN.
A word does not say anything
And at the same time it hides everything
Just as the wind that hides the water
Like the flowers that mud hides.
A glance does not say anything
And at the same time it says everything
Like rain on your face Or an old treasure map
A truth does not say anything
And at the same time it hides everything
Like a bonfire that does not go out
Like a stone that is born dust.
If one day you need me, I will be nothing
And at the same time I will be everything
Because in your eyes are my wings
And the shore where I drown.
Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.
I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he has published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.
When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.
an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.
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