Victoria Legrand Quotes

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

A great speech is literature.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

If you can talk, you can write.

There's a saying, 'It's easy to write songs, but very difficult to write great songs.' I'm going through that right now.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

I write too much to ever keep everything just for myself.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

Voice is the first instrument.

I love words, and I love that there's so many words available to make a point and to create a picture.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

Predictions can sound really good if you're good with words and can express them eloquently and give people ideas and inspiration in their head. But I'm not really good at that, so I don't want to.

All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

It's funny how you can struggle with one piece and write a better one in a minute. When things come easy, it means it's good.