Confucius Quotes

Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

This is why it is sometimes hard for introverts to find words: we really hate to compromise, and words are always a compromise.

We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

Ink is the transcript of thought.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.

There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.

A language is a map of our failures

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.