Quotes About Expression

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words. Never to doubt that you will live to utter them. Never to doubt that you will tell your story .

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

What is technique but the absence of passion?

For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?

Words are like wild birds - they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.

But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play?

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing - how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles', your 'ideals' - and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible.

Let them write angry letters to the Government- they haven't been loved enough, there has been some crime

I could talk fast -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.

so too, her glazed ceramics and her macramé are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.

you cried, they tried to comfort you. But if you were stony faced they let you alone.

Mulheres eram especialistas em chorar, assim como os homens eram humilhados e impedidos de chorar. Mulheres eram purificadas pelo choro, assim como os homens eram maculados e manchados pelo choro.