Quotes About Expression

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may. - from My Olivetti Speaks

AESTHETICS OF OPERA Don't sing an aria To someone who can't Sing one back.

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE Make the stage an actor Make an actor the stage.

The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is that all about? What is it for?

It's the way you look whenever she mentions her fiance. My cat looks like that before he hacks up a hairball.

I raised my hands, trying to shush her. Don't shush me, she said, eyes blazing. I hate being shushed.

I'd appreciate it if you would just call me a goddamn son of a bitch, Louis said. A man too foolish for words. All right. You're a foolish son of a bitch. Thank you, he said.

essential to verbalize your good intent. In face-to-face conversation

females will argue with you for 30 minutes then be like , I aint even gonna argue with you!

He didn't say a word, but he grew coldly, murderously furious.

The world was her oyster, except she didn't care for oysters. Better yet, the world was her raspberry. She liked raspberries.

Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it's hard to summon it when you really need it.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

You can not stop you from being who you are.

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

And I wrote you. Volumes. Volumes.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.

Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls