Quotes About Expression

Conoce esa sensación? Seguro que sí: tropezarse con un artista cuyo trabajo te habla tan directamente que es como si los dos compartieran el mismo lenguaje cómplice, y eso a la vez te reafirmara en lo que siempre has pensado y te dijera algo completamente nuevo. (...) ¿No la ha sentido, entonces?

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness." (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews? Basically everything, except technical proficiency, Walter said. Right. But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying, Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

It's like there are these words, they're out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.

the novel is a liberal form…and the act of fiction writing is a performance of sympathy with people you are not .

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

Hell-o-oh," she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals. "Hello," Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.

Chip, who much preferred queer theory to queer practice

But what you are saying now, the way you're speaking to me - there's a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once… It's kind of amazing to see it now.

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

She wore an expression of love so naked it seemed to Pip almost obscene.

His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn't crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who'd rejected you, than compassionate forbearance?

Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.

How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant?

His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet.

Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.

Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.