Top 100 Quotes About Writing Expression
#1. Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.
Richard Peck
#2. I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn't something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
Wayne Dyer
#3. Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.
Ashwin Sanghi
#4. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.
Barack Obama
#5. Writing has always been my go-to form of expression. Whenever I was going through something as a kid, I would write it down and I would turn it into a poem.
Jhene Aiko
#6. Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
Anne Lamott
#7. They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged.
Lorrie Moore
#8. poetry. i am not writing it.
(make way for me please)
it is my skin. dripping with light.
Sanober Khan
#9. Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#10. Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
Edgar Degas
#11. The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.
Criss Jami
#12. He hung a patient expression on his face, the kind usually seen on people who talked about releasing your anger and surrounding yourself with good feelings while writing off anyone who disagreed with them as unenlightened.
Amy Fecteau
#13. There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
H.P. Lovecraft
#14. Writing is like dancing, or sports, where the expression of grace come only through movement.
Steven Taylor Goldsberry
#15. No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#16. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.
Frederick Douglass
#17. Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to ... But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.
Thomas Jefferson
#18. Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express.
Kathy Acker
#19. Writing is an outward expression of instinctive insight that must be summoned from the vastly deep of our mysterious selves. Therefore, it cannot be taught; indeed, it cannot even be summoned; it can only be permitted.
William Hughes Mearns
#20. Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!
Avijeet Das
#21. I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
John Updike
#22. Writer's block is just another name for fear.
Jacob Nordby
#23. Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
Sylvia Plath
#24. Writing for enjoyment of expression does not need an audience of more than one.
Edith Schaeffer
#25. Style has always been in my mind the author's Self, the creative expression of that Self.
Whit Burnett
#26. The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#27. The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
Mark Twain
#28. I write about what I want to write about, and so the film comes out as a very personal expression even if its subject matter is totally prefabricated.
Woody Allen
#29. You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
Gustave Flaubert
#31. If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.
Alex Chilton
#32. I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.
Corey Taylor
#33. Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.
Thurston Moore
#34. I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.
Virginia Woolf
#35. Writing allows you the unique and uncensored expression of whatever wants to be spoken.
Deborah Sandella
#36. Words are changing. I find that old expressions are outdated, so when I write something, I try to find a new expression that hasn't been born yet. It's difficult.
Agnes Denes
#37. When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
#39. What if I have not been writing? Feelings wouldn't have died; expression wouldn't have sharpened. I wouldn't have analyzed many of my deeds and others' deeds to me. Small and irrelevant looking incidents of life wouldn't have appeared priceless.
Shankar Lamichhane
#40. Acting is the most pure fun as far as jobs go, but it can be limiting in terms of freedom of expression. You are never the master of the story, just a part of it. But writing and directing give you the power of the gods.
David Hayter
#41. [O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#42. I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.
Edgar Winter
#43. Almost every cartoonist, when he's sitting down to draw a funny face, if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he's drawing. But when I would write a story - I know it's going to sound almost ridiculous and infantile - I would, in a way, start living it.
Al Jaffee
#44. Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
Tom Perrotta
#45. People quote proverbs without realizing they're really in awe of the authority of their truth and the power of their expression ...
John Geddes
#46. Writing my blog has saved me thousands on therapy.
Phil Cooke
#47. Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
Erica Jong
#49. I told him, "The writing instinct has always lain dormant in me. Now it is in the process of metamorphosis. The era of transition has passed. I am on the threshold of expression."
He said, "Balls.
John Fante
#50. Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.
Richard P. Feynman
#51. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.
A.E. Samaan
#52. Writing is the skillful expression of feelings through the vehicle of words
Christian Michael
#53. Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I'm not lonely, if that's what it seems like. Always writing things down.
Chris Campanioni
#54. When I write songs I write for myself ... I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.
Patti Scialfa
#55. Writing is not about self-expression; it is about putting words on paper.
Gordon Lish
#56. Your eyes make me pick up my pen and write.
Avijeet Das
#57. If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
#58. A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'
Sophy Burnham
#59. How do you write about something, even something real and painful-like suicide-when all of the writing that's been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?
Jeffrey Eugenides
#60. Writing is the voice of the heart' Julia Suzuki
Julia Suzuki
#61. Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
#62. Don't exercise your freedom of speech until you have exercised your freedom of thought.
Tim Fargo
#63. Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search ... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.
Italo Calvino
#64. What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?
Charles Mingus
#65. I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
Alanis Morissette
#66. I am very present in my work and my work is somehow an expression of my soul, but at the same time I think that a writer cannot write out of nothing.
Paulo Coelho
#67. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#68. What is writing but an expression of my own life?
Zane Grey
#69. What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.
Christopher Hitchens
#70. Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.
Harold Innis
#71. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#72. "Best in the world," "lowest price in existence, " etc are at best claiming the expected. But superlative of that sort are usually damaging. They suggestion looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make
Claude C. Hopkins
#73. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#74. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#75. Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
Brian Raif
#76. Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.
Noah Lukeman
#77. I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - that you should take on this work like a holy calling
Elizabeth Gilbert
#78. Remember yourself. Deep inside, you have an observer, a constant neutral witness to your posture, gesture, facial expression, breathing, taste, impressions of light and sound. Don't leap to interpret. Just be there and observe.
Jonathan Price
#79. Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.
Kirby Larson
#80. The act of self-expression - through writing a journal or letters - often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#81. The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Henry Adams
#82. There is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.
Monique Wittig
#83. Artistry exists in everyone. What makes it blossom is a soul's personal desire to find an outlet for expression.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#85. If I could find the right words, I'd say what the blue sky says.
Marty Rubin
#86. The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.
Marita Golden
#87. Writing is a lifelong disease.
Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.
J.R. Tompkins
#88. I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
Flannery O'Connor
#89. Writing is not about ideas, it is about the expression of ideas - a written expression.
Paul Raymond Martin
#90. Someone like John Prine can write a song that tears into your soul, turn it over, and write a song that makes you laugh and feel light as a feather. With someone like him, you're getting a real picture of a person, a real expression.
Scott Avett
#92. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Yukio Mishima
#93. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
Vladimir Nabokov
#94. It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#95. The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
Minae Mizumura
#96. Writing is my passion, expression and an incessant obsession.
Pushpa Rana
#97. Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.
Meridel Le Sueur
#98. I remember writing the series with great enthusiasm, and I hope this enthusiasm continues to inspire newcomers to see the truly life-changing possibilities Wicca can offer. As a 'religion of self expression' I wish everyone an inspiring quest on this path called Wicca.
Morgana Sythove
#99. I think expression is at it's best when it comes from an honest place, so I always try to use my own life experiences, feelings, struggles, frustrations etc. as the catalyst for my song writing.
Kate Brown
