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1 " I've come to suspect that whenever any ability is difficult to learn and rarely performed well, it's probably because contraries are called for - patting the head and rubbing the belly. Thus, good writing is hard because it means trying to be creative and critical; good teaching is hard because it means trying to be ally and adversary of students; good evaluation is hard because it means trying to be subjective and objective; good intelligence is rare because it means trying to be intuitive and logical. "
― , Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching
2 " One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between "concepts." There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience... Sociology—by its very nature?—seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died "
― , Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process
3 " The real problem is writers’ refusal to take full and open responsibility for what they are saying. If a writer is willing to say, in effect, “I’m me, I’m saying this, and I’m saying it to you,” his words will not just have more life in them, they will also be clearer and more coherent. The "
4 " writing stories, scenes, and portraits is a very inductive process and will lead you to new insights and new points of view you couldn’t reach by reasoning alone. "
5 " Certainly for many people the most intense music is the music of the spheres—the perception of built-in coherence in nature—and that is the music of pure ideas. We "