Quotes About Expression

Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.

This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

I eat stories like grapes.

He held the apple box against his chest. And then he leaned over and set the box in the stream and steadied it with his hand. He said fiercely, Go down an' tell 'em. Go down in the street an' rot an' tell 'em that way. That's the way you can talk. Don' even know if you was a boy or a girl. Ain't gonna find out. Go on down now, an' lay in the street. Maybe they'll know then.

They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyay. Kino sighed with satisfaction -- and that was conversation.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable... The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

He wanted to say something beautiful, I think.

There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.

I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.

Perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin.

She cared deeply about words and she hated their misuse as she would hate the clumsy handling of any fine thing.

The party had all the best qualities of a riot and a night on the barricades.

When Mary is confused or perplexed, she spurts anger the way an octopus spurts ink, and hides in the dark cloud of it.

He wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth.

I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody

Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an' not do no murder. You done right. Don't you kill nobody if you can help it.

Unless a writer's capable of solitude, he should leave books alone and go into the theater.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks

To finish is a sadness to a writer- a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves—smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that molded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.