Descriptive Challenge Quotes

I have almost never written about my experience as a soldier on the battlefield, because I tried, and I found that it is beyond my capacity to describe the battlefield. The battlefield consists mostly of smells, and it is very difficult to describe smells in words - very difficult indeed.

One of my great frustrations for 35 years at the paper was the fact I couldn't play a record for the reader when I was writing about an artist. How can you describe the beauty of Emmylou Harris' voice without hearing it, the sensual lilt of a Duane Allman guitar solo without actually hearing it, or the growl of Johnny Rotten without hearing it?

It's hard to describe my style. People will tell me that I'm really flowy.

It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.

Chronicler picked up his pen, but before he could dip it, Kvothe held up a hand. "Let me say one thing before I start. I've told stories in the past, painted pictures with words, told hard lies and harder truths. Once, I sang colors to a blind man. Seven hours I played, but at the end he said he saw them, green and red and gold. That, I think, was easier than this. Trying to make you understand her with nothing more than words. You have never seen her, never heard her voice. You cannot know.

Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.

To be able to let you know who someone is in just a couple of words, I'd have to pick the most pronounced features of a character's personality. And I always feel like I'm leaving out so many important little ones.

And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?

You can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.

What pen can describe this scene of marvellous horror; what pencil can portray it?

[On Malaysia:] Mr. Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and such tropics) is like a visit to a new planet. This new wonder-world, so enchanting, tantalising, intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see what I am seeing!

I'd like to think that most of what I do is self-evident if you're listening to it or seeing it. But I don't mind the fact that it's hard to describe.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.

What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.

To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

Co-writing is a very unnatural feeling. It's like wanting to document a feeling that you have and then trying to get someone else to describe it for you.

I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.

I can't really describe my sound.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

I have to use the word 'insurgent' because I can't think of a better word right now.