Quotes About Expression

Question asked of Thomas Perry. What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? "If any writer is going to be remembered after he's gone, it will be for the parts of his work that are absolutely original, and would never have existed if he hadn't written them. So if you're writing a scene that you've read, watched, or heard before, then you're wasting your time and your reader's.

Words are not simply an expression of the self; they help to create the self. In struggling to say what we are, we become what we say.

Every dance you know is an anti-grammar of another dance you do not know.

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

Because I am what I am, I may be what I will to be. My individuality is one of the modes in which the Infinite expresses itself, and therefore I am myself that very power which I find to be the innermost within of all things.

Perfect harmony with its environment, and perfect expression of its own inward nature are what constitute Beauty;

Nothin' wrong with sentiment, if it's what you truly feel. That's the trouble with folks, they're afraid to show what's inside 'em.

His heart's in the right place, but his tongue's an affliction.

When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter: there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.

If your mind jumps to crazy story ideas from little things you see all around you, you might be a writer.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

A picture may tell a thousand words but it doesn't tell a story

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived.

Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.

the theatre was the greatest of all the arts.

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.

would always advise any young writer for the theater to do everything—to adapt plays, to translate plays, to hang around theaters, to paint scenery, to become an actor. . . . There's a bottomless pit in the acquisition of how to tell an imagined story to listeners and viewers.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.