Quotes About Expression

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.

Write. Don't think. Relax.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth

I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

Good writers touch life often.

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.