Quotes about Expression

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I'm a writer; it's not just what I do, but who I am.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view. It's informed by our own understanding of spirituality; things that matter, things that are important to us. I write about things that matter for me.

I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.