Quotes About Expression

Si je revois un jour Sophie, je le lui dirai : rien n'est plus cruel que le silence puisqu'il laisse subsister l'espérance tout à la décevant toujours.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. MARK TWAIN Did

Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life?

Sonderbarerweise sprechen wir oft davon, aber es ist gerade [grenzenloses Empfinden], was wir lebenslang vermeiden.

Ein Mann, der die Wahrheit will, wird Gelehrter; ein Mann, der seine Subjektivität spielen lassen will, wird vielleicht Schriftsteller; was aber soll ein Mann tun, der etwas will, das dazwischen liegt?

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness

a face more suited for making book than selling books.

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.

You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.

But he was saying, '--and so I'm not going to make any speech--' In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

What you are is an expression of history.

Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's & peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful & pure.

The monkey said, "Bad. Bad, shitty bad.

Christ on a bike. -- Lola Sugarman

For the next 16 hours, fueled by coffee and amphetamines, I wrestled with John Lennon's scrawls and codes and symbols. As I transcribed his words, I said them out loud like an incantation, and I began to feel Lennon's energy flowing through me.

Eliade once said in my hearing that the highest human being was the mystic, since he could actually perceive and experience ultimate timeless reality; the second highest was the poet, who could at least express what the mystic saw in adequate language; the third was the historian of religion like himself, who could only record the seeings and the words of the mystic and his poet.

Walt Whitman: "Hold me up, I want to shit.

If you enjoy knocking self-publishing writers, write something better first, then, knock on!

The weakest punches are thrown with the tongue.