Quotes About Expression

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.

Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. 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. ...... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss

Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

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...Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

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 entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear>

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?

She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

arguing too loudly to hear him. He sometimes couldn't help

I quess when you bottle things up inside you, misunderstandings pile up.

No em clavis un sermó; els sermons són desoladors perquè son un ranxo, igual per a tothom, quan cada u sent el seu mal com a únic i intransferible.

Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape.

That's all right. We may say what we daren't write. "And sing what is too foolish to say

He looked as if he had been weaned on a lemon.

Sagittarians rarely talk about their feelings—they talk about what they think about their feelings.

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

In my experience... the danger of things getting out of hand is there whenever anyone opens their mouths.

Oh, my! Well . . . that

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.