Quotes About Expression

It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.

Jesus, she said. -Are you in there at all? -I am, Annie, I told her. -Bursting to get out.

I'd made a girl laugh and touch my arm when I'd told her that I was thinking of rewriting it as a musical after the finals. But I couldn't look at her while I spoke. I could look at her, briefly, and say nothing. Or I could make her laugh while I looked over her shoulder or at a wall. I couldn't do both. But I could write.

Gloria screamed, but nothing came out. She could feel the scream in her throat, but it was clinging there, too scared to climb out of her mouth. Raymond might have screamed, too--he wasn't sure. His face was an exploding red ball--that was what it felt like. His heart was in the middle of his head. He couldn't see a thing.

We laugh, that we may not cry.

1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next. -from a review by Roger Ebert of film Starting Out In the Evening (2007). http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/p...

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

Drama holds a mirror up to life, but needn't reproduce it.

A work is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about what it is about.

The dancers march about and twirl their scarves as if Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will had been gotten pregnant by Busby Berkeley.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors and they don't need to act much.

People obtain psychological release through the simple process of recounting their grievances to an attentive audience.

Orgasmic realizations will always be frowned upon by those who feel they have to keep up appearances.

Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them.

People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.

Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.

The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This

Our word 'poetry' comes from Greek poi?sis, the skill of making things;

In figurative painting, in tonal music, in the cliché-ridden poems of heroic love and mythic glory, we find the same disease – the artist is not exploring the human heart but creating a puffed-up substitute, and then putting it on sale.

We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life – our own life and all that life means to us – and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.