Quotes About Expression

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

I've been on TV a long time, and I've never had a catch phrase.

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.'

I remember being interviewed about my first novel, 'The Colour of Memory.' They kept using the expression 'your first novel,' and I said, 'No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.'

I'm pan-Latino, or whatever that phrase is. It's not a sexy phrase, but it is a sexy, cool thing. That's how I feel.

I have a phrase I say: 'What the damn?' It's my favorite. It just came to me one day.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.

I'll hear a phrase around me that someone says... I'll write it down in my notebook, and as soon as I'll sit down with my guitar, I'll come up with the rest of the arrangement there.

I don't really think about the fact that a lot of people are watching 'DSDS' or about the way I should phrase my sentences.

I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

I had spend a lot of time looking at things intellectually, coming from the head, let's say, rather than the heart, and saying things that way. Turns of phrases became paramount to any kind of feeling behind them, which is not to say they were all devoid of that.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

Wushu is a move in Chinese, a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

As anyone who is gay will confirm, being that way is not something you become, it is a set of emotional and physical responses that just are.

I think we all have this special equation with our art where we don't feel the need for anything else; it almost gives you everything. It gives you physical strength, it gives you mental peace.

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.