Quotes About Expression

O Time: hold still awhile. I have so much more work to do. There are so many things I want to express. But time just keeps ticking away, and the earth never for an instant ceases to turn.

Action Painting was all the rage then, and everybody was adopting this style and selling the stuff at outrageous prices. My paintings were the polar opposite in terms of intention, but I believed that producing the unique art that came from within myself was the most important thing I could do to build my life as an artist.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.

No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Sometimes pus Sometimes a poem. Something always burst out. And always pain.

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune system comes into operation, and a self-healing process takes place, mental and physical." He called art "a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

I sing and drink, giving no thought to death; with arms outspread I fall upon the grass, and if, in this wide world, I come to die, then it's certain to be from sheer joy that I live.

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it most certainly not beautiful

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Everyone has to go mad, it's essential fir everyone to go mad - as soon as possible! It's essential - I know.

The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.

The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. "… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer... ("Letter To Stalin")

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. ("Letter To Stalin")

Now, think of a square, a living, beautiful square. And imagine that it must tell you about itself, about its life. You understand, a square would scarcely ever think of telling you that all its four angles are equal: this has become so natural, so ordinary to it that it's simply no longer consciously aware of it. And so with me: I find myself continually in this square's position.