Characters and words

From Thomas Jones’ review of James Woods’ How Fiction Works (which is new in the U.K, forthcoming in North America):

Characters, as well as readers, are surely entitled to perceptions, thoughts and feelings that they are unable to put into words. But because words are the medium of fiction, the writer uses the best words available to him to convey to the reader the character's state of mind.

As Henry James put it in the Preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew, a novel Wood singles out for praise: 'Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.'