Somehow, the words don’t have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That’s how I start. Once I’m off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop – not that what I do is poetry.
Words
Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
Words are loaded pistols.
If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed the deeper they burn.
I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.
It was my care to make my life illustrious not by words more than by deeds.
You may be assured that we won’t ever let your words die. Like the words of our Master, Jesus Christ, they will live in our minds and our hearts and in the souls of black men and white men, brown men and yellow men as long as time shall last.