Quotes About Expression

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?

There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion.

Love is a dunghill, and I'm the cock that gets on it to crow.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.

if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it.

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.

Tell him I think writing is lousy, Bill said. Go on, tell him. Tell him I'm ashamed of being a writer.

I'm fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet.

He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a mine, that is within them.

I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.

But when we sit together, close,´ said Bernard, ´we melt into each other with phrases.´

Ay, he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

Easy reading is hard writing

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima

I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

The first draft is always shit.

She smiled and her face was heartbreaking.