Quotes About Expression

So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.' Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains :)

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Authors and actors and artists and such - Never know nothing, and never know much.

Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face - Poets alone should kiss and tell.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

Little Words When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; And I can only stare, and shape my grief In little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown The bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down Feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, No beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, Can spell them out.

I can't write five words but that I change seven.

I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.

ANECDOTE So silent I when love was by He yawned, and turned away; But sorrow clings to my apron-strings, I have so much to say.

And couldn't it be I was young and mad If ever my heart on my sleeve I wore? There's many to claw at a heart unclad, And little the wonder it ripped and tore.

I hate writing, but I love having written.

I hate writing, I love having written

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

Baudelaire, William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, the Beatles, and Hunter S. Thompson were as much the fathers of Saturday Night as Kovacs, Carson, Benny, and Berle. Dan Aykroyd called it Gonzo Television. They were video guerrillas, he'd say. Every show was an assault mission.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.