"I would have made it shorter, but I didn't have the time."

If you know me, you know I am a total sucker for these Yogi Berra - style 'inversion' quotes. The kind that seem counterintuitive, if not totally joking at first, until you think them through and realize they work.

Holy cow. I would have included this in yesterday’s post about simplification, but it was far too powerful to shoehorn in at the end. It deserves its own post and more.

There’s a well-known quote that basically goes:

It gets attributed variously to Blaise Pascal, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain (of course), and a host of other credible speakers.

Before I began writing, I thought this quote was good for a light chuckle.

Having lived inside the world of writing for some years, this has become one of the most fundamentally honest, wise statements I’ve ever known. It is all too true. It is all too real.

I’ll end this before the irony bellows so loudly you can’t hear any of the content - but if you’re a writer, you'll know all too well what they were saying.