Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.
I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.
I always like to pretend two things: one, I'm sitting in the seat beside you watching the game together. I'll say, 'Wasn't that a great shot? Boy, it sure was.' The other thing I do is pretend I'm talking to people who are non-sighted. I try to create a word picture. I get more mail from blind people thanking me.
Usually, when I'm rappin', I'm creating a big story or a concept song that sounds like a movie to me.
The best basketball announcer is one who allows you to close your eyes.
The songs that work best are broad lyrically and have one strong concept in the metaphor.
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.
And as he spoke of understanding, I looked up and saw the rainbow leap with flames of many colors over me.
As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books. I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you.
The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.
Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.
The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.
Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.
Give me any two pages of the Bible and I'll give you a picture.
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
When I make music and I'm talking on records, it's like I'm painting a picture. In my mind, I'm seeing a film.
The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.
Even when I was a kid, I had this insane head of flaming hair. It looked like a wig.
When you're trying to create imagery, you're trying to create a feeling or a mood.
Lyricism is about painting a picture. It doesn't have to be a bunch of punchlines.
And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
