Quotes About Expression

We must do away with all explanation and allow only description in its place".

Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal

Don't concentrate on becoming a better humor writer, just concentrate on being the best writer that you can become. If you're funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you're not funny, the work will still end up being good. Concentrate on being the most honest writer you can be, and let everything else follow--because it will.

He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk.

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.

Life is serious but art is fun!

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

This is a writer's lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

There are always suicides, Garp wrote, among people who are unable to say what they mean.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY!; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

That's okay, I said. We're writers. We make things up.

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

I'm just a woman with a penis! she would say, her voice rising.

The point was - he wasn't acting . It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character... Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns - the real Jack Burns at last.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write

He was asleep—he was still dreaming—though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who's writing in his sleep.

You know, it's not only writers who have this problem, but writers really, really have this problem; for us, a so-called train of thought, though unspoken, is unstoppable.

Fucking men.

This is the way confessing works—once you start, you can't stop.