Quotes About Expression

What does anyone want out of life? What kind of freak do you suppose I am? I miss books and good verse and decent talk. I miss women, to speak to, not to rape; and children, and men creating things instead of destroying them. And from the time I wake until the time I find I can't go to sleep there is the void—the bloody void where there was no music today and none yesterday and no prospect of any tomorrow, or tomorrow, or next God-damned year.

To pass over grief, they say, the Italian sleeps; the Frenchman sings; the German drinks; the Spaniard laments, and the Englishman goes to plays. What then does the Scot?' To Jerott's mind sprang, unbidden, a picture of the sword Archie Abernethy was trying to clean at this moment below. 'This one,' he said, 'kills.

Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.

A smile, bracketing his still mouth, spread like bane over Lymond's pale face.

I echo like a mynah, that's why.

You have a tongue, have you not, which breaks backs? I have madness in many forms, but that which springs from the passions of the heart is not in my nature. That is all. We are all fashioned differently.

I don't need to strike you. Words will do just as well.

Music, the knife without a hilt.

Mime doesn't always mean comedy, my dear; far from it.

Khátún, what is his face?' 'A lemon?' said Philippa.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

he appeared to be struggling with something trapped in his throat; it turned out to be a word. thanks, he said.

Oh damn!' said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus.

I always have a quotation for everything--it saves original thinking.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

Perhaps you didn't say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots - dreadful things!' 'Yes,' said the Duchess, 'he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, dear, it does sound a little rude.

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you--though that's nothing new.