Quotes About Expression

I remember when I started performing, I thought, 'Why is this something that we do after hours, underground?' I was waiting on the world to change and the idea of this art to become mainstream, and I think that's what 'RuPaul's Drag Race' has really accomplished in such an eloquent way.

I got involved in the underground world known as ballroom culture, and I used to walk a category called 'face,' and it was a very heavily Latino culture - it's black and Latino - and they used to call me 'cara,' which means face in Spanish, so I started putting 'cara' on everything: hats, jackets.

Although drag has a long cultural history in America, it remained largely underground till the late 1980s.

I'm usually bored with both gangsta rappers and underground ones, too.

On 'Underground,' we had used contemporary music to pull you into the present and not just look at it as a portrait on the wall and in the past.

I think there's so many amazing LGBTQ artists, ranging from commercial to underground, that are influencing people at large.

If you shut down 4chan, shut down 8chan, you're just pushing it under the rug. Underground, it's just gonna get worse.

If you look at one of the basic underlying tenets of liberty, it's freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to access of information. If we start sequestering that and blocking it off, you're going to have pockets around the world that are going to become more and more isolated.

My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way.

Glee's good because it tackles the issues by embracing what's different, and telling people, 'That's what makes you special' - I think that's the underlying thing.

There were songs that we cut out after we chose the name, because 'Praise Break' turned out to be an underlying concept that I didn't know was there.

I like to write my shows coming up with the stupidest things I can think of then finding a way I can incorporate a running theme or an underlying message that takes a stupid idea and gives it something worth watching.

I would never undermine a person's interpretation of a creative work.

The work of black creatives seems to always get undermined in one way or another, and that's what this new generation is actively changing by speaking up. We aren't accepting group categorization and group classifications to describe our work anymore - it just leads to group dismissal.

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

What I hope 'Mastry' ends up doing is completely undermining or doing away with the notion that artists are a savant: that they do things that can't be articulated, driven by inner turmoil they don't have access to.

I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head.

No matter how happy or hopeful I am, I always tend to drift back to that. It's underneath all the music I've ever written... An artist is trying to tell you how he's feeling. And if that accidentally becomes entertaining, it becomes a career.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

The quality of the writing, really. Simple as that. Beautiful words. It's very nice as a singer to do great songs, which have wonderful lyrics and strong feelings underneath the song.

There is a pressure, but my job essentially is not to listen to that pressure, not to buckle underneath that pressure, but instead to continue making music in the way that I have been making it.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what's underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don't think it ever will be.

The ability to make new work from old work - especially if that new work is different enough that it doesn't dent the market for the old work - is something that benefits all creators, since so few can claim not to have a giant or 10 supporting them underneath.