Quotes About Expression

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.

He lived out his whole life as an anthem to the pleasures of a bad mood.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

I had read for the way words sounded, not for the ideas they espoused.

When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.

music as we danced our way in both

she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets.

Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn't be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I'd be laughed at, humiliated—and I'm old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As

In the hour it took to finish that meal, I learned that silence could be the most eloquent form of lying.

As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I'm supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don't quite know it. But I trust I'll begin to know it soon.

I'm an American," I announced to all around me. "And I get to think anything I want to and so do you, by God, so do you." It became my credo, the central theme of my life

The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. It is admired only if it's done in silence.