Quotes About Expression

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.

And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. (on Ernest Hemingway

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life... and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

If a story is in you, it has got to come out.

In writing, you must kill your darlings.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.

It was that his words, his telling, just did not synchronize with what his hearers believed would (and must) be the scope of a single individual.

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.