Quotes About Expression

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy, he said aloud.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

There is no such word as love. Just as there is no word for sorry.

I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on 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.

Anything was better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon...

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn...

Writing is a hard business, but nothing makes you feel better

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

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another. -- Hemingway's advice to other young writers in A Moveable Feast.

He used the word gamut.

In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

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. On the question you raised, the effects of wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.-Interview for the Paris Review, 1956

Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. ... Harry didn't say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again.

But it is death nevertheless, one of the subjects that a man may write of.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy,' he said aloud. 'But since I am not crazy, I do not care.

Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out.

Amit az ember leírt, az többé nem sanyargatja.

With her mouth closed she was a rather pretty girl.