Quotes About Expression

When a German dives into a sentence, you won't see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.

When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper.

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

When angry, count to four when very angry, swear.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it a way over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

It is astonishing how few stories have been told perfectly.

Great periods of poetry begin with an inordinate self-consciousness, and only gradually attain to the natural.

It's funny, because music is one of those things it is natural to go into. You hear it so much growing up, it kind of permeates you and eventually you spew out some music of your own.

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.