Quotes About Expression

In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.

I always want people to expect the unexpected, to hear me in records that have nothing to do with bachata. 'Golden' is the golden opportunity for them to appreciate me on other records.

Producing zines can offer an unexpected respite from the scrutiny on the Internet, which can be as oppressive as it is liberating.

I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra - when it came out, it was an explosion, completely unexpected as far as I was concerned. I was just forming a band.

I love to paint and beautify the most unexpected of places - I've painted everything from doorways to trains but have always wanted to do something really huge and different.

Whenever I work on a role, I always allow it to subconsciously take me to a place that is magical and unexpected, rather than consciously driving it to a place.

I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.

It's the meanest thing to abuse your power as a songwriter. To write pointedly about someone... it's kind of unfair to use them. They can't answer you or have a rebuttal.

Most of the time, comparing printed song lyrics with poems is like comparing recipes with food: that's to say, patently unfair.

On stage, I find anger at the unfairness of the world easily.

The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

I like jokes and one-liners. I enjoy entertaining and making people laugh, being the funny man. But when I'm launched into unfamiliar environments I shut down, and as I relax then my character emerges.

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

In 'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac,' Mr. Yorke's lyrics were often unfathomable, moaned and mumbled and forced beneath the surface of the music. In 'Hail to the Thief,' most but not all of the words can be decoded after a few listens.

If I let my brain follow its path unfettered, it would be kinda ugly.

When I'm playing, I'm never through. It's unfinished. I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. That's where the high comes in.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.