Quotes About Expression

I have never been such a real person as I am today.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.

the only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.

In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

Teasing is very often a sign of inner misery.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

Everyone has a little book in them, and in most cases, that is where it should stay.

My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her.

New forms of the artistic register are one of the infallible signs of an authentic moment.

There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.

Laughter can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound,and also the most sinister and animalistic one.

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

By the way, if you knew how you sounded when you hissed, you wouldn't do it: you sound like such berks when you do that.

that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write "more like the way you talk.

In other words, a handful of religious bullies and bigmouths could, so to speak, outvote the tradition of free expression in its Western heartland.

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for.

There's nothing like not writing for making you unhappy.