Quotes About Expression

Do you write novels? I said. Novels, Lord no, she said. I can't even stay married.

Writers, it is said, all carry a chip of ice in their hearts

And I'm glad to see you made it." "I did," he said, giving her a smile that exposed wonderfully masculine teeth. Masculine teeth? What the heck was that?

Every writer is a reader first.

Nobody wants you to be an artist or a writer, Maggie said. Not only did the world not care if you ever painted a picture or wrote a book, the world kind of wished you wouldn't. Your challenge was to do it anyway.

When you dance, do you feel desire? Do you feel as if you were summoning up a greater energy? When you dance, are there moments when you cease to be yourself?

That is why I opened Santiniketan under the shady trees and the glories of the sky." He motioned eloquently to a little group studying in the beautiful garden. "A child is in his natural setting amidst the flowers and songbirds. Only thus may he fully express the hidden wealth of his individual endowment. True education can never be crammed and pumped from without; rather, it must aid in bringing spontaneously to the surface the infinite hoards of wisdom within.

The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in

The best books are those whose readers think they could have written them.

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.

He paused. Then added with great emphasis: You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.

Silence becomes a woman…

Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.

It should not be a crime to discuss any idea, however outrageous

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.