Quotes About Expression

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

Anatole Broyard

It seemed to me that a penis was a very primitive instrument for dealing with life.

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best.

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it.

Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you.

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Man is summed up in Art. All the rest is moonshine.

Let us love the books which please us and cease to trouble ourselves about classifications and schools of literature.

The beautiful things I have seen are still so vivid in my mind that I feel the task of writing them would be a useless fatigue. Why spoil my pleasure-trip by collecting notes? Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

Je mets pas mal de choses d'abord sur mon papier ; ensuite j'ajoute la simplicité.

Whatever one may do, one is always alone in the world. That is what he wishes to say. He is right. You may always explain: you never are understood.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

The more wine gets through your mouth the more silly words come out of it.

Whom do we speak to, and how do we encode our messages? How can we be heard or read, even after we are dead?

Who taught you to swear first? Who burst your head wide open with a sentence? Whose linguistic tics have you ingested, do you know, bust out without thinking

The simplest surrealist act consists in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height.

Art is a collarboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

But realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.

it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.