Quotes About Expression

the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality.

That's the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame.

the theater is the living consciousness of the world.

If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer.

Go for the hum.

Ulla Sallert, wearing one of her famous facial expressions with about eleven ambivalent meanings and twenty-three enigmatic nuances, drops into a deep curtsy.

Layton combined dialogue, song, and dance in a fluidly shifting action

Like Oscar Hammerstein, LaChiusa knows that characters express themselves in their own wording as well as their own music.

Se voglio dire che il disegno – costruzione di una cosa o oggetto o strumento – è fatto bene, è bello, certamente lo posso dire quando voglio... ma se non sono un potente non lo posso sostenere.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.

It is sheer hell in this house. I would have to be quite a writer to describe it properly. Anyhow, I sprang from the chaos and it is my business to pull myself out of it.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

I've said what I had to say.

And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.