Quotes About Expression

women should be obscene but not heard.

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience.

and when you're home, what's wrong with skin? Or as near as local custom permits.

Go ahead and cry. Tears are lubricant for the soul. Males would be better off if they cried as easily as women

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

Who sneezed? WHO SNEEZED? I did. I did what? I sneezed. I SNEEZED, SIR! I sneezed, sir.

Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.

The only alternative to torture is art" George Bernard Shaw. This means we will engage in our creativity or have to face its alternative brutality.

My little Marochka speaks the truth of her heart, as she must. As must every Rasputin. And indeed as must every person.

poetry is a special way of imagining the world or, to put this in more cognitive terms, a special mode of thinking with its own momentum and its own peculiar advantages.

I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute.

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

I've learned a hell of a lot from [William S.] Burroughs. I think the best things in my books probably are inspired by Burroughs. I think about what Burroughs wrote and then I try to go one step further. And I may go one step back; I don't know.

Van Gogh could see 28 shades of black. Why?

Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.

Why do we say "dumb" (mute) for stupid? Because "a good mind means a good mouth," and the human mind is a verbalizing circuit.

One is reminded of a story about Mark Twain and his very fashionable and respectable New England wife, who once tried to cure him of his salty riverboat speech. Mrs. Twain noted every cuss word he used all week long and then woke him Sunday morning and read it all back to him. Twain listened calmly and commented, You have the words, my dear, but you haven't got the music yet.

Milton said once, poetically, that whoever murders a book, murders a man. Psychologists would mostly agree that that is symbolically true. Destroying a book, like the psychotic behavior of slashing a photograph, expresses rage at the person who wrote the book or the person in the photo. One cannot help wondering, at this point, about those who burned the books of Dr. Reich or conspired to suppress the books of Dr. Velikovsky.

Norbert Weiner once simplified the meaning of this equation by saying that great poetry contains more information than political speeches. You never know what will come next in a truly creative poem, but in a George Bush speech you not only know what will come next, you probably could predict the whole speech, in general, before he even opens his mouth.

I suddenly remembered that Adolph Hitler once said that anybody who paints the sky green should be sterilized at once. I thought I understood the Right Man more deeply. The Right Man stays in one reality-tunnel because wandering into the reality-labyrinth of the creative mind terrifies him.

The difference between a great writer and a minor one is fundamentally this: that the minor writer always has answers—glib answers, slick answers, memorably-worded answers, resounding and pretentious answers. The great writer dares to stand before you naked, armed only with his questions.

Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the poor hungry wretches that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.

Whether we like it or not, many of our pop artists today play post-modernist games with their audiences.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)