Quotes & Sayings About Writing Expression

What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. ... It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. ... . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." ... And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. — Franz Wright

When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me. — Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. — Zadie Smith

Writer's block is just another name for fear. — Jacob Nordby

Style has always been in my mind the author's Self, the creative expression of that Self. — Whit Burnett

Writing, not dancing, is the chosen form of expression of the white man. — Gerald Jonas

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. — Geoffrey Harvey

Forms of expression that unnecessarily specify gender are widely regarded as sexist. In technical writing, sexist usage is easy to avoid. — Justin Zobel

Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression. — Noah Lukeman

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn't something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me. — Wayne Dyer

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

Both sex and death are eternal themes. You could make thousands of movies on this theme, and whether you have a human being who is painting, singing, making a film, writing, these are the themes that you will come back to and return to. If you don't have any of these artistic expressions, sex is one of the only gifts that nature gave you for free, so it is very important to celebrate it. And then, with death, we are condemned to that. This is absolutely present in our lives. — Pedro Almodovar

Writing is like dancing, or sports, where the expression of grace come only through movement. — Steven Taylor Goldsberry

The act of writing involves documenting and studiously examining interactions of all aspects of the self, the environment, and culture. Writing is an illustrious act of self-expression. Writing resembles a 'coming of the age' story because the ongoing process of defining a person's personality and character is representative of the synergistic product of the continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world, the constant process of developing psychological, social, cognitive and ethical self. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother. — Richard Peck

Long ago, during my apprenticeship in the wine trade, I learned that wine is more than the sum of its parts, and more than an expression of its physical origin. The real significance of wine as the nexus of just about everything became clearer to me when I started writing about it. The more I read, the more I traveled, and the more questions I asked, the further I was pulled into the realms of history and economics, politics, literature, food, community, and all else that affects the way we live. Wine, I found, draws on everything and leads everywhere. — Gerald Asher

Painting a picture is writing a poem with paint. — Debasish Mridha

I love to direct! I get really jazzed by directing, but directing is not the same kind of personal expression, the same kind of personal intimate expression that writing is. Because when you're directing, you're basically managing, basically getting out of people doing their job, except when you see them going astray. — Alan Ball

Of all I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man's life upon this earth - and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound. — Thomas Wolfe

Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters. — Agnes Repplier

I told him, "The writing instinct has always lain dormant in me. Now it is in the process of metamorphosis. The era of transition has passed. I am on the threshold of expression."
He said, "Balls. — John Fante

Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, "I'm sorry, good buddy, you've written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner"?
The idea has some validity, but I don't think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I'm looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than "This sucks." (Although most of us know that "I think this has a few problems" actually means "This sucks," don't we?) — Stephen King

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life. — Anais Nin

Art is the overflow of emotion into action. — Brian Raif

Writing is a lifelong disease.

Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you. — J.R. Tompkins

In the rare moments I permitted any stillness, I noted a small fluttering at the pit of my belly, a barely perceptible disturbance. The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself. The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. When I did not write, I suffocated in silence. — Gabor Mate

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a vast expanse of time before the Norman Conquest in 1066, from which fragments of literary texts remain, although these fragments make quite a substantial body of work. If we consider that the same expanse of time has passed between Shakespeare's time and now as passed between the earliest extant text and 1066, we can begin to imagine just how much literary expression there must have been. But these centuries remain largely dark to us, apart from a few illuminating flashes and fragments, since almost all of it was never written down, and since most of what was preserved in writing was destroyed later, particularly during the 1530s. — Ronald Carter

What is writing but an expression of my own life? — Zane Grey

"Best in the world," "lowest price in existence, " etc are at best claiming the expected. But superlative of that sort are usually damaging. They suggestion looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make — Claude C. Hopkins

The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience. — Marita Golden

Writing is the skillful expression of feelings through the vehicle of words — Christian Michael

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match.
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One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue. — Renni Browne

Don't have conversations taking place in empty space. Weave in background details of where the action (dialogue is a form of "action") is taking place. Don't have invisible people talking, either. Let the reader see them as they speak - their facial expressions and gestures. And by all means "cue" the speeches to the speakers. — Lee Wyndham

People quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression ... — John Geddes

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression ... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking ... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. — Herbert Read

He hung a patient expression on his face, the kind usually seen on people who talked about releasing your anger and surrounding yourself with good feelings while writing off anyone who disagreed with them as unenlightened. — Amy Fecteau

I remember writing the series with great enthusiasm, and I hope this enthusiasm continues to inspire newcomers to see the truly life-changing possibilities Wicca can offer. As a 'religion of self expression' I wish everyone an inspiring quest on this path called Wicca. — Morgana Sythove

Writing is my passion, expression and an incessant obsession. — Pushpa Rana

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things. — Robert D. Richardson

We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes. — David McCullough

If I could find the right words, I'd say what the blue sky says. — Marty Rubin

Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express. — Kathy Acker

Writing allows you the unique and uncensored expression of whatever wants to be spoken. — Deborah Sandella

Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all humans are born. Yet Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. As Carmen Conde (a teacher who was also active in Mujeres Libres) wrote, describing the relationship of individuality and community: "I and my truth; I and my faith ... And I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don' t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours. — Martha A. Ackelsberg

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. — Erica Jong

Ever hear the expression "write what you know?" My version says "write what you want to know." If you want to know about the history of Spain, write about the history of Spain - fiction or nonfiction. If your fascinated by the old west, maybe your character lives there. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time. — Criss Jami

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful. — Gustave Flaubert

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn't the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression. — Andre Kertesz

The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas." To that end, the Constitution protects more than just a man's freedom to say or write or publish what he wants. It secures as well the liberty of each man to decide for himself what he will read and to what he will listen. The Constitution guarantees, in short, a society of free choice. — Potter Stewart

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words. — Leo Tolstoy

No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Your eyes make me pick up my pen and write. — Avijeet Das

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all want to matter to someone, to leave a mark. Writers just take those thoughts, feelings and desires and express them in such a way that the reader not only reads them but feels them as well. — Vicktor Alexander

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search ... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable. — Italo Calvino

Don't exercise your freedom of speech until you have exercised your freedom of thought. — Tim Fargo

Ian Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He ... was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with the usual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that encapsulated the aspirations of the age, and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself. He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created ... Ian Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it ... To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality. — Henry Chancellor

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression. — Corey Taylor

How do you write about something, even something real and painful-like suicide-when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression? — Jeffrey Eugenides

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking. — Robert Pinsky

Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent
I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space. — Robert Fulghum

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction. — Alex Chilton

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction. — Ezra Pound

I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression. — Edgar Winter

Words are changing. I find that old expressions are outdated, so when I write something, I try to find a new expression that hasn't been born yet. It's difficult. — Agnes Denes

The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even "realized" the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: "You're going to die. And you're going to die. And you're going to die." I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused. — Elif Batuman

Writing is not about self-expression; it is about putting words on paper. — Gordon Lish

Thinking cannot be clear until it has had expression-we must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in half torpid form. Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flowers. So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development-thought is the blossom; language is the opening bud; action the fruit behind it. — Henry Ward Beecher

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others. — Elena Ferrante

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing. — Mark Twain

Writing is self-expression and no matter how complex the idea might be in the head when it is put in paper, it simplifies. It gives pleasure. It keeps track of who we are. Keeping a habit of writing is very beneficial to anyone. It is a bliss. — Bishwas Mishra

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language. — Criss Jami

Almost every cartoonist, when he's sitting down to draw a funny face, if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he's drawing. But when I would write a story - I know it's going to sound almost ridiculous and infantile - I would, in a way, start living it. — Al Jaffee

Writing is both my expression to the world and my way to hide from it - you get who I am without actually seeing me. — Paige

Writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs. — Julian Assange

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality. — Douglas Adams

If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music. — Jean Sibelius

Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I'm not lonely, if that's what it seems like. Always writing things down. — Chris Campanioni

They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged. — Lorrie Moore

Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to ... But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt. — Thomas Jefferson

Acting is the most pure fun as far as jobs go, but it can be limiting in terms of freedom of expression. You are never the master of the story, just a part of it. But writing and directing give you the power of the gods. — David Hayter

It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression. — Roger Ebert

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words. — Thurston Moore

Bramble had taken another pencil from Delphinium, and Azalea's napkin, and wrote something new.
You're afraid of the King. Admit it.
Azalea grimaced at her untouched food, burning in humiliation as Lord Bradford took the napkin and read it. This time, he looked to be discreetly writing something back beneath the table.
Fairweller blinked at the King for a moment, in which Lord Bradford handed Bramble her napkin. She opened it and turned a rosy pink.
My lady, it read,who isn't?
Bramble pursed her lips and kicked Lord Bradford beneath the table-hard. His face twitched befre regaining its solemn expression.Azalea buried her face in her hands.
"All we ask is for you to consider it. That is all," said Fairweller.
"Oh." Lord Bradford's voice was slightly strangled. "Yes. Thank you."
Bramble threw the pencil-smudged napkin onto her plate. "I'm done," she said. "May we go to our room now? — Heather Dixon

Suppose we think while we talk or write
I mean, as we normally do
we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the same
first thrill of achievement that the young gambler or oboe
player feels: winning a little, losing some, the gambler sees the
glorious possibilities, exactly as the young oboist feels an indescribable
thrill when he gets a few phrases to sound like real
music, phrases implying an infinite possibility for satisfaction
and self-expression. As long as the gambler or oboist is only
playing at being a gambler or oboist, everything seems possible.
But when the day comes that he sets his mind on becoming a professional, suddenly he realizes how much there is to learn, how little he knows. — John Gardner

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances. — Andre Breton

I think the underlying purpose is expression. It's not about technique, it's not about hitting the right note, writing the perfect prose, having the perfect brushstroke. It's about expression of oneself, the things around you, and the emotions. I think expression is the one word that I would use, whether it's for sorrow, tragedy, joy, or even the need to express and be heard. — Charlie Albright

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. — William Hazlitt

To draw does not simply mean to reproduce contours; the drawing does not simply consist in the idea: the drawing is even the expression, the interior form, the plan, the model. Look what remains after that! The drawing is three fourths and a half of what constitutes painting. If I had to put a sign over my door to the atelier, I would write: School of drawing, and I'm certain that I would create painters. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

What exactly is the new verse movement? The New Verse Movement of the 1910's was to make poetry relevant again by immersing it into the spaces, technologies, and social dynamics of the modern city.
And Now In The Present And Future ?
The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century follows these same beliefs. To somehow ignite the spark and to help make poetry relevant again in a new age of technologies (The Internet) and to support new & experimental as well as older poetic forms. The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century is all about change and free expression of the creative mind. — R.M. Engelhardt

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort. — Joyce Carol Oates

Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords. — Marguerite Yourcenar

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression? — Anne Frank

A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.' — Sophy Burnham

Writing is a mysterious activity. — Susan Sontag