Quotes About Expression

Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play.

Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.

Nature has no outline. Imagination has" (Blake).

The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching.

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because it now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves.

People don't like seeing being afraid to express an opinion and seeing their neighbors dragged away to prison camps. You'd think that would be obvious enough, wouldn't you? But governments—here, anyway—have always seemed unable grasp it. That's what happens when you can't see further than short-term expediency.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

It is better to explore an idea than to keep a polite silence.

Like the sky opens after a rainy day we must open to ourselves.... Learn to love yourself for who you are and open so the world can see you shine.

But all I had to show for the week was a blank sheet of paper. Maybe I could tell Ms. Gleason I had come up with a new kind of poem--the invisible kind.

I drew a picture of Bigs Maloney. It came out looking like Frankenstein on a bad hair day. In other words, it looked just like Bigs.

Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.

Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.

The New York Times Review of Books is toilet paper. Used.

And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all.

What is written is more influential than what is said.

As anyone who has ever read a used book knows, nothing exposes readers to quite such a high degree of nakedness as the underlinings and marginalia they live behind...

Long, beautiful, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen... I adore hair!

There are silences harder to take back than words.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Ars longa, vita brevis," she whispered, a quote from Hippocrates. One of her favorites. Life is short, art eternal.

And I honor the man who is willing to sinkHalf his present repute for the freedom to think,And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.

Nature fits all her children with something to do,He who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.