Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Expanding a simple idea into a long book is inefficient; it is better to summarize existing works than to write them.
- In plain terms
- Instead of writing long books, pretend they exist and just summarize them.
- What can you take from it?
- Conciseness is more valuable than unnecessary expansion in writing.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Is brevity always better than detail?
- When is a long book justified?
Another view
Some ideas genuinely require length to be fully developed.
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