Quotes About Expression

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is ever happy anywhere.

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn't fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.

She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

She put a hard-boiled sneer on her face and gave me plenty of time to get used to it

Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else.

Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

Her voice was as dead as the summer before last. (Nevada Gas)

Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

He smiled his first smile of the day. He probably allowed himself four. [...] He was doing an awful lot of smiling that day. Using up a whole week's supply.