Bill James Quotes

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

I think thoughts in my head bounce around in my skull and, if they keep bouncing around in my skull, they get worse and worse. When they come out of my mouth, they make people happy.

The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everybody speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

I find it really difficult to even articulate things that I've done in the past. I express myself through the characters that I play, not through the articulation of them later.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Writing is always harder than talking.

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

I'd always loved movies, but it wasn't some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, "I want to write things, and I want people to see them more."

I have always wanted to write in such a way that will make people think, Why, I've always thought that but never found the words for it.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

As a matter of fact, I rather feel like expressing myself now.

People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.