Quotes About Expression

Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.

Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.

If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don't think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page. If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

Don't cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn't mean to write, leave it.) Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don't even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.) Lose control. Don't think. Don't get logical. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.

When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing." (p.90)

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.

We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don't wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.

It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.

I met a doctor the other night who told me he had always wanted to be a writer. I nodded. People always tell me that...Then I thought to myself, 'You know, I've never met a writer who wanted to be anything else. They might bitch about something they're writing or about their poverty, but they never say they want to quit...and if they do abandon it they become crazy, drunk or suicidal.' Writing is elemental.

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

You have to let writing eat your life and follow it where it takes you. You fit into it; it doesn't fit neatly into your life. It makes you wild.

OK, now write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, tell me what you carry.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.

Reach out of the deep chasm of your loneliness and express yourself to another human being.

I had to get slow and dumb (not take anything for granted) and watch and see how everything connects, how you contact your thoughts and lay them down on paper.

Style requires digesting who we are.

Explore the rugged edge of thought . Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.

It is our hope that writing releases us. Instead maybe it deepens the echo. We call out to our past and the call comes back. We are alone--and not alone.

Keep your hand moving. (Don't pause to reread the line you have just written. That's stalling and trying to get control of what you're saying.)