Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.
I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.
The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
She'd grown up believing in hell in an abstract nightmare way; but west Texas had given her something more concrete upon which to dread the afterlife.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not ver...
Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me o...
It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.
We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.
Think about what binds you to your husband and he to you. Marvel at the strength of that bond, which is both abstract and concrete, spiritual and legal.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "future perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.
A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?
They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get d...
