Written Expression Quotes

All of the drama with my family and me and my mom and the separation between us and all that crazy stuff - I actually wrote about that. I have a song called 'Dear Mom,' and it's about the trials and tribulations with my mom, so I wrote about that and just everything that I've been through.

Writing is always harder than talking.

Shakespeare is the best writing ever. It's incredibly rich, dense, expressive language.

I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.

It's very hard to come across as a passionate human being in print. People can't hear the inflections in your voice.

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.

Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.

The written word is everything.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

I can't stand reading anything that I've said.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

You are in every line I have ever read.

A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation's mind in writing and the concentration of intellect for the purpose of spreading itself abroad and multiplying its energy

Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar.