Quotes About Expression

Gabriel flashed him the one-fingered Mudra of Contempt.

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.

Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.

I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

Thus the essence of freedom of opinion is not in mere toleration as such, but in the debate which toleration provides: it is not in the venting of opinion, but in the confrontation of opinion.

The most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises spontaneously in people's minds.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible.

We are all poets, really.

For if I when I speak am unable to make myself intelligible, then I am not speaking - even though I were to talk uninterruptedly day and night...Therein lies the distress and anguish.

Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.

Dicke Bücher sind deswegen dick, weil der Autor nicht die Zeit hatte sich kurz zu fassen.

Z wie Zwerch. Eine lustige Farbe, bei der man schon lachen musste, wenn man sie nur sah. Oder hörte. Man könnte traurige Dinge damit anstreichen.

Anyone can write. Some people can write a bit better than others; they're called authors. Then there are some who can write better than authors; they're called artists.

Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere.

No one who writes a good book is really dead.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that's all.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.

Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.

This revelation about bi-planes and elephants can in turn prompt the listener to elaborate another improvisation, which will coax out another aspect of the hidden dream, and so on, until as much of the dream is revealed as possible

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.