Quotes About Expression

I'm attracted to artists like Frida Kahlo, because her work was her life, her questions, her outrage, her suffering, her pain. Everything is in her work.

I'd been suffering all of my life. I think comedians and artists, we do that. We know how to be the life of the party and enjoy exuberance outside of pain.

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

For one thing, I don't think art needs to be about suffering; sometimes it really seems like it's only the art about pain that is interpreted as profound, and in my work for years I've really tried to deal with subjects that are substantial, not just fluffy, but presented in a more playful, approachable kind of way.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.

When someone is suffering, you have to see this in the body and the face. I say all the time that actors use their bodies like objects of war.

It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence.

You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.

The arts are suffering amongst public schools, but also, minority theater companies are struggling, and I firmly believe in freedom of expression through the arts.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

For me, songwriting is really where it's at. I turn to use the guitar just to help me write the songs. That's it. As a result, my guitar playing suffers pretty horribly.

Comedy is all about the character. When you're too focused on the gags, the character suffers, and you don't get the laugh. Comedy has to come from the character.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I love to sing and I do think that my strength as a singer is... I think I have a voice that is certainly sufficient under most any circumstances... but I think my strength is that I really am an actor and I really do have to own what I am saying.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then... like I was suffocating.

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

Religiosity is suffocating in Pakistan. It invariably stokes the fire in driving society to religious extremism.

Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.

If you call yourself a singer, then you must have the ability to sing anything, whether it's pop, classical, rock, sufi, or folk.

I started listening to Sufi music when I was 21.

Arts and crafts, or getting to be in a play with people, or making a little short film, that's pure sugar, because the stakes are so low.