Quotes About Expression

The eyes showed the soul and they were always hardest to mask.

The eyes show the soul and they are the hardest to conceal.

A silver speaks it's own language, does it not?

You have only to feel the sacred music of your soul, to dance.

There are moments on stage when everything comes together. Then the kid in the front row coughs.

If I don't write it, they can't buy it.

Sometimes, Sam would say, "I love you, Daddy," and hold her breath for as long as she could so she wouldn't miss it if he's finally whispered, "I love you, too." Mommy said Daddy loved Sam but that men just don't say that kind of thing out loud. Sam knew that wasn't true because Mary McCallister's daddy always said, "I love you, baby girl!" for no reason at all.

Pet me, touch me, love me, that's what I get when I perform. That's when I'm really getting what I want.

British diplomats, constantly exposed to American political-ethical rhetoric, find their professional skills tested to the limits by the need to keep a straight face. For illustrations of what I mean, study the photographs of the expressions worn by Mr Douglas Hurd at any international conference involving all the Western allies.

Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone.

That's why I like fast film. It gives you more freedom to light more naturally.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to 'Write hard and clear about what hurts.

Finally, don't be fooled by words like orientate or commentate, misguided back-formations from orientation and commentator; orient and comment do the job just fine. Don't use big words to gloss over the truth or to pump air into ideas.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to "Write hard and clear about what hurts." It's good advice. But to follow it, you must stop reading.

To find the right pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings.

The words must conjure the character of a place for readers who may never see it. This may seem like magic, or incomparable talent, but the inspiration starts with acute observation.

If all of this seems paradoxical, get used to it. Language is paradox.

Why do so many of us, when we sit down to write, sound like word processors rather than wordsmiths? Why do we spew the slogans of the consumer culture we work for, rather than sounding like the bards we want to be?