Quotes About Expression

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

We write to discover what we think.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Ten watercolors were made from that star.

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language

I write to know what I think.

The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print.

I don't know what I think until I write about it.

Les gens qui ont perdu quelqu'un ont un air particulier, que seuls peut-être ceux qui l'ont décelé sur leur propre visage peuvent reconnaître. Je l'ai remarqué sur mon visage et je le remarque à présent sur d'autres. C'est un air d'extrême vulnérabilité, une nudité, une béance.

Had he not warned me when I forgot my own notebook that the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write?

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view.

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening

The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

All I know about grammar is its infinite power.