Quotes About Expression

I read to escape...I write to help others escape... --Howard Hopkins, Author of The Chloe Files

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

I exaggerate but only to revive the dying art of hyperbole.

It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone.

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.

Here is an appropriate use of the exclamation mark: The last thing he expected when the elevator door opened was the snarling tiger that leapt at him. "Ahhhhh!" ... In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it.

When the reader has stopped to wonder at your delamificatious vocabulary, or, worse, when the reader has stopped because the word you've used has no more meaning to him than a random ptliijnbvc of letters, the reader is not involved in your story. ... Generally, saying 'edifice' instead of 'building' doesn't tell your reader anything about the building; it tells the reader that you know that word edifice.

it has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else.

She moved as lightly as a mote of dust gamboling in a sunbeam passing through the stained glass window of a French Gothic cathedral. Her breasts stood up proudly like twin tin soldiers. Looking at her made him feel an uncontrollable urge to vomit forth his innermost feelings, straight at her.

El lector espera que seas tú el que tenga algo que decir sobre la vida, porque para eso pagamos a los escritores.

There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Poetry is a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

Outlines can help, but not if you begin with them. If you begin, instead, by writing down everything, by spewing out your ideas as fast as you can type, you will discover the answer to the first question: the fragments you have to work with are the various things you have just written.

write whatever comes into your head, as fast as you can type, without reference to outlines, notes, data, books or any other aids. The object is to find out what you would like to say, what all your earlier work on the topic or project has already led you to believe.

I do believe that it takes a strong dose of alienation to make a good artist or writer in the modern world. You can't be too well-adjusted and still have anything interesting to say.

Yes, I believe blue material is funny, but if that's all you've got, you're dead in the water. It's not good.

It is no coincidence that music is called the universal language and used as a form of worship.