Quotes About Expression

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel. (- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

This was such bad writing that it was good.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

How can you talk if you don't say anything? I said. You talk without words. We are always talking without words. Well, what good are words, then? Not very good, most of the time. Most of the time they're only good to keep back what you really want to say, or something you don't want known.

The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy—the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

When I think of the good things still to be written I am glad, for there is no end to them, and I know I myself shall write some of them.

Tú hablas sin palabras. Todos estamos siempre hablando sin palabras. —¿Y para qué valen las palabras, entonces? —No valen para mucho, casi nunca. La mayor parte de las veces, únicamente para ocultar aquello que realmente quieres decir, o algo que quieres saber.

Singers are the happiest horses' asses.

El hombre es un documento, objeto de poemas malos.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father refuse thy name, thou art thyself thou not a montegue, what is montegue? tis nor hand nor foot nor any other part belonging to a man What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, So Romeo would were he not Romeo called retain such dear perfection to which he owes without that title, Romeo, Doth thy name! And for that name which is no part of thee, take all thyself.

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

They do not love that do not show their love.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.

Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make love known?

Words, words, words.