Quotes About Expression

It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren't certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking—when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes ("News From The World")

Imagination is conjunctive and unifying; the sour, habitual wars of the self are disjunctive and separating. When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

It was my mother who gave me my voice. She did this, I know now, by clearing a space where my words could fall, grow, then find their way to others.

Because that's what fantasy is, isn't it?" he demanded. "Not just making things up, but taking ideas and giving them hands and feet and claws and teeth!

Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

I wasn't raised to acknowledge my own feelings, let alone stick up for myself like that.

he grinned a grin that began in his eyes and went everywhere at once. It was devastating.

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

The hair on its haunches was like crisp black wire. Its mouth was frozen and clenched in death, bearing an expression of stubbornness I admired.

The surrender in it seemed to have cut new lines around his brown eyes.

This is why there is poetry. For days like these.

Something was missing in my life—in me—and I thought writing could fill it or fix it, or cure me of myself.

I want to write something, but I don't think I can without being emotional." "Just make a start. Begin anywhere." "It might be terrible." "It might be. That's not the worst thing." "No," I agreed. And it wasn't. The worst thing—I already knew it—would be feeling too scared to try.

and he grinned a grin that began in his eyes and went everywhere at once. It was devastating.

He kept his emotions locked away behind a wall, which made him a wonderful negotiator.

Write, and do it now instead of capitalizing on your nice figure and your pretty hair. Stop being so charming." The sting of his words made me dizzy. My ears rang. "If I am charming it's your fault and Mother's." "You're just afraid to be lonely.

I want to write one true sentence, he said. If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I'll be satisfied.

The problem with cats is that they get the exact same look on their face whether they see a moth or an axe-murderer.