Literary Expression Quotes

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.

I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

I would spend my time telling stories or writing them.

I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.