I really enjoyed this quote. It speaks directly to improving your language skills, but I think can more broadly be applied to just about any skill at which you wish to improve (emphasis mine):

Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph. Exercises as boneheaded as you take a book you really like, you read a page of it three, four times, put it down, and then try to imitate it word for word so that you can feel your own muscles trying to achieve some of the effects that the page of text you like did. If you're like me, it will be in your failure to be able to duplicate it that you'll actually learn what's going on. It sounds really, really stupid, but in fact, you can read a page of text, right? And “Oh that was pretty good…” but you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in that text until you start trying to reproduce them.

An interesting look at the root meaning of the word “art” and its relationship to design:

We know that where we perceive no patters of relationship, no design, we discover no meaning … The reason apparently unrelated things become interesting when we start fitting them together … is that the mind’s characteristic employment is the discovery of meaning, the discovery of design … The search for design, indeed, underlies all arts and all sciences … the root meaning of the word art is, significantly enough, ‘to join, to fit together’ — John Kouwenhoven, as quoted in “A Designer’s Art” by Paul Rand (xiii)

The essence of graphic design:

Graphic design is essentially about visual relationships–providing meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words, and pictures. It is the designer’s job to select and fit this material together–and make it interesting.

On the process graphic design, and why respect for the individual and his/her process is absolutely necessary (LOVE THIS!!):

The separation of form and function, of concept and execution, is not likely to produce objects of aesthetic value … any system that sees aesthetics as irrelevant, that separates the artist from his product, that fragments the work of the individual, or creates by committee, or makes mincemeat of the creative process will in the long run diminish not only the product but the maker as well.

A statement on the process of design, the first part always being that the designer must break down before he can build up:

Design starts with three classes of material:

1. The given - product, copy, slogan, logotype, format, media production process.
2. The formal - space, contrast, proportion, harmony, rhythm, repetition, line, mass, shape, color, weight, volume, value, texture.
3. The psychological - visual perception, optical illusion problems, the spectator's instincts, intuitions, and emotions (as well as the designer's own needs).
   As the material furnished him is often inadequate, vague, uninteresting or otherwise unsuitable for visual interpretation, the designer's task is to restate the problem. This may involve discarding or revising much of the given material. By analysis (breaking down of the complex material into its simplest components - the how, why, when and where) the designer is able to begin to state the problem

Lastly, the job of artist (and by extension a good graphic designer) is to call attention to the ordinary, to make people stop and reconsider what they believe they already understand:

[designers should practice] the fine art of exhibiting the obvious in [the] unexpected...The problem of the artist is to defamiliarize the ordinary.

Gary Larsen, creator of The Far Side comic strip, in the preface to his complete comic book anthology:

It's been almost seven years since I hung up my eraser. (For the record, an eraser was the most essential tool I owned.)

Earlier in the introduction, his newspaper editor talked about how fastidious Gary was in writing the captions for his comic strips. He made this observation, which for anyone familiar with The Far Side rings true:

good writing can save bad art, but good art can never save bad writing.