Expression Challenge Quotes

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

As a writer, there are times when you have something to say, and yet no particular 'hook' upon which to hang the missive you are burning to release.

The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it.

I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing.

It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.

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

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.

Finding a thought for an aphorism is not hard. Putting a kink in its tail is the hard part.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

I do not so easily think in words.... after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear... I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them.

Words can be very powerful. I find them very difficult.

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.

In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.

I grew up in a very loud family where you had to fight to get your voice heard, in a good way.

I can write music but I'm not much for words.

I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

I find it hard to deliver straightforward things.