Quotes About Expression

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi's, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

It is, I think, almost a law that what one is afraid to say because it will be rejected by the atmosphere of a time, will turn out to be a few years later the most important thing of all.

If you choose to make a nonentity of yourself, do, but don't stick that label on me.

Las palabras aparecen en tu mente y allí bailan a ritmos de los que tú conscientemente nada sabes. Cabos y rabos de palabras: pueden ser una indicación de un estado de ánimo oculto. Pueden removerse o cantar durante días, enloqueciéndote. Pueden ser como película invisible, como pelicula adhesiva, entre tú y la realidad.

Why should I be expected to shut up about everything I believe in?

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

He never said Don't tell your mama. He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)

Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don't do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.

Anything." I loved the way she said that. Granny's "Christian women" came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

The holy act of sex, my sex, done in your name, done for the only, the best reason. Because we want it.

believe that sexual desire is a powerful emotion and a healthy one. I'm pretty sure that when anyone acknowledges and acts on their desire, it does us all some good—even if only by giving other people permission to act on their desire—that it is sexual repression that warps desire and hurts people.

The things you hesitate to talk about," Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, "those are the things you should be writing about.

Deux ou trois choses dont je suis sûre, et l'une d'entre elles est que raconter l'histoire jusqu'au bout est un acte d'amour

I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.

He finished his drink. 'I don't like mornings either,' he said. "That's why I'm a writer.

She gave him a woman smile. Not for him, for Laurel because she scorned Laurel.