Quotes About Expression

I missed the way the dark face closes, the way the dark eyes watch, the way the dark face opens and lights up the room.

A strange smile wavered just around his face, not yet in his face

It had not really been written to make money—if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.

the look in his eyes was so bottomlessly bitter it was almost benevolent.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real-and as persistent- as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.

There seemed to be more chatter—in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion.

My sullenness delighted him. "You're charming," he said. "Do you always speak like this?

And he suddenly takes the bag of tomatoes and smashes them against the nearest wall. Thank God the wall is blank, thank God it is now beginning to be dark. Thank God tomatoes spatter but do not ring.

And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound.

His smile made me feel a little foolish.

He grinned. I could not tell whether he grinned because he thought I was lying or because he knew I was telling the truth.

pavements and banging from the walls of houses with

Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it. The multiple truths about a people are revealed by that people's artists—that is what the artists are for.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is." —

Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see." ? James Baldwin

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

You see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience. But the vocabulary won't hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on the how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. - Autobiographical Notes

Artists are here to disturb the peace...

To open your mouth in England is...to put your business in the street: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.