James Frey Quotes

I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

My people have called upon me to speak to you. The red man has no books, and when he wishes to make known his views...like his father before him...he speaks with his mouth. He is afraid of writing. When he speaks he knows what he says; the Great Spirit hears him. Writing is the invention of the pale faces;

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

Not all stories translate well when read out loud.

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory .

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page...that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

My family is filled with wonderful storytellers. I lack their gift of gab, so it's a relief to be able to write.

The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave; but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the mountains, leaving no token of power. It is the written human speech, that gave power and permanence to human thought.

I like how I write better than how I speak.

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

My family were Russian Jews. They got you to read as soon as you could. And then assumed you would read a lot. People didn't really tell stories but they were good talkers. That's important for a writer, to hear speakers.

Radio is better than writing because they can't lie. Cause sometimes writers be straight lying, bro, and these headlines be making me mad.