Quotes About Expression

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and

Metaphor is the medicine.

Existe mais de uma maneira de queimar um livro. E o mundo está cheio de pessoas carregando fósforos acesos.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Words are like leaves and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.' Alexander Pope.

Last night I've thought about all that kerosene I've used in the past 10 years, and I thought about books. And for the first time, I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper, and I'd never even thought that thought before. It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life. And then I come walking in and BOOM, it's all over.

The stories, the plays, were born in a yelping litter. I had but to get out of their way.

my aunt Neva was the guardian and gardener of the metaphors that became me. She saw to it that I was fed all the best fairy tales, poetry, cinema, and theater, so that I was continually in a fever about life and eager to write it all down.

The sense of this, it seemed to me, might be that from above or below, or from any point of the compass, the creative Word might be heard, which is the great thesis of democracy.

A handsome girl with a round, dark face set like a flower on a stalk-like neck smiled prettily at John as she shut the door, then glanced at his companion and became lost in the contemplation of his eyes.

Her every step seemed an advertisement of her entire anatomy.

You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

My task is to make you hear, to make you feel,and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility

His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

An appeal to me in this fiendish row - is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense... Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.