Quotes About Expression

Sometimes I want to suck on a beautiful word. To lick it clean.

Inflate the sentence. Try to make it burst.

But couldn't he burn the twaddle instead of straining it. The story of the man who uses a Bunsen burner to singe from his lips the words with which a story might otherwise have been told.

O I'm babbling.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

There is no point in having the idea for a wonderful novel if you have never learned to read and write.

Inner creativity is always there - it just has to be released from its prison.

All forms of art demand a discipline that is not unlike praying. That lays a pipeline between the art & the truth.

Broad views about life have shrunk into religions, and we have been turned into their symbols. They regard us as empty symbols. Symbols of a religion, a nation. We mustn't be trapped by that. In this war, let that be the ground of your contest. A ground that cannot be reduced to definition and detail.

When people see your personality come out, they feel so good, like they actually know who you are.

Sometimes I wonder who my mother might be if she weren't married to my father. Everyone around him seems that much less free-spirited, that much less open to possibility, so much more controlled. At her office she is loud and filled with infectious laugher. Here she is more quiet and deferential. I can cut a cucumber, I say more sharply than I intend. She winces and busies herself with searching for a vegetable peeler, if only to make a point.

Sometimes when you are hearing what you do not want to be hearing then everything in your body stops to working and all you can be doing is looking because unless you are blind then your eye never stop looking. That is how I am looking because my mouth is not working enough for me to speak and even my leg are hardly working for me to move.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk?

When an idea is preserved, isn't its form unimportant.

Form betrays. Form can betray. What matter, if the eternal meaning retains its true value.