Quotes About Expression

Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate

On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

Why do you love words so? he heard Amy ask. ... They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.

Maybe he doesn't really think it now. But sometimes things are said and they're not just words. They are everything that one person thinks of another in a sentence. Just one sentence.

It surprised Anna and it upset Anna how small her life was each time she tried to tell it, to shape it in order to escape it, how it always came out too quickly as a few dispiriting sentences so easily dismissed.

He was your cobber? Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate.

O amor é público, ou não é amor.

She seemed a series of slight flaws best expressed in a beauty spot above her right lip. And he understood that the sum of all these blemishes was somehow beauty, and there was about this beauty a power, and that power was at once conscious and unconscious.

It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.

I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things.

There was no meaning in it, not then and now now, but you can't write that, can you?

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.

On writing: I don't like doing this, but it feels so good when I stop.

I like writing that's smart on the page.

Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense

Ann says I fabricate these feelings. But so what? I still have them.

Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.

Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.