Descriptive Limitations Quotes

It's no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they've already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that.

To be able to let you know who someone is in just a couple of words, I'd have to pick the most pronounced features of a character's personality. And I always feel like I'm leaving out so many important little ones.

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “here it is.

tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me".

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

I doubt whether I ever read any description of scenery which gave me an idea of the place described.