Quotes About Expression

Words belong in contexts, not pegged out like biological specimens.

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that.

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.

It's important to put it like that: not "I am a writer," but rather "I write stories." If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

Its purpose was to defend democracy in this country, first of all. Then to defend the principles of freedom of thought and expression.

By the light of a candle, he composed a letter, saying everything as briefly as possible:

Lyra swore with every word she knew.

De blik die hij zich zo goed herinnerde van toen hij haar lesgaf, die uitdrukking van blanco, ongenaakbaar verzet, schuilde achter haar ogen.

Schools must take children to the theatre. This activity must be subsidised. Children should be able to join a youth theatre near where they live, and learn how to take part in every aspect of putting on a play. Places like that should be subsidised too. These things are not luxuries: they're essential to our wellbeing.

was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. • WILLIAM BLAKE •

The classroom is a torture chamber , interrogating poetry until it confesses.

but he wondered how many others had seen the loneliness in her expression when she wasn't guarding it.

The two old men couldn't help smiling, but whereas Farder Coram's smile was a hesitant, rich, complicated expression that trembled across his face like sunlight chasing shadows on a windy March day, John Faa's smile was slow, warm, plain, and kindly.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

People are unjust to anger — it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do.

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.

The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn't deprive me of the silence — the music is the silence coming true.