Quotes About Expression

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down a a typewriter and bleed. E. Hemmingway We don't write to be understood, we write to understand......... Love yourself. Dare to dream. Live on purpose!

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Please do it your own way. Do it in the mornings when your mind is cold Do it in the evenings when everything is sold. Do it in the springtime when springtime isn't there Do it in the winter We know winter well Do it on very hot days Try doing it in hell. Trade bed for a pencil Trade sorrow for a page No work it out your own way Have good luck at your age.

Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart and artless fart in the home.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

When she cried her whole face went to pieces.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.