Indirect Expression Quotes

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

Listen to really old blues guys and how they weren't allowed to sing about what they meant; they alluded to things. I find that style amusing, and I think it's a little harder to write.

And isn't it better really to leave things only hinted at?

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

People don't want to be put on the spot over whether or not they like you, they want to come to that conclusion themselves. It's ok to let someone know you're interested, but there's no need to go any further than that.

I say things, but I say them indirectly. At the same time, I try to make my images as direct as possible.

If you really want to communicate something, even if it’s just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.

The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful meanings indirectly.

The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.

Women often seemed to leave things unsaid, and in his limited experience it was what they did not say that proved the most trouble.

I never personally complained; everybody else complained for me.

My father writes through clothes.

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Everything I wrote about wasn't about me, but about the people listening.

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

I'm much more comfortable speaking through my characters' voices than my own.

Peter Morgan's writing is so much about what you don't say: you're saying one thing but there's 10 other things going on, and those are the best writers like Chekhov... they're masters at a sort of naturalism, and yet there is all the subtext.

Writing is always personal in some way but not always in a direct way.

I just have my characters say my controversial opinions and then hide behind them.

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

I don't want to write lines where characters tell me exactly how they feel; I want to see people talk about anything but their feelings, like they do in real life.

I talk in subjects and verbs, and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end, and it ends.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.