Quotes About Expression

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

I always considered myself as a character actor. I always try to be versatile to show different sides of human experience.

It is good to tell people what we mean, but it is infinitely better to show them. People are looking for a demonstration, not an explanation.

Blast your soul, you hussy!" he exclaimed in exasperation.

Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus.

Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills!

It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It's like an engine without fuel -- can't get anywhere without it. Or like a lighthouse without a light on top -- doesn't guide anyone in to home or safe harbor.

epresentative

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference

Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

If the creative process is so powerful, it would be natural to wonder why many artists have difficulties in their lives. It is because they do not know what they know.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

A poem… begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

The artist in me cries out for design.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says it means, nothing less but nothing more.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.