Quotes About Expression

When she cried, he would say, "there is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

What you write chooses you.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the 'literariness' of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. —JEROME, A.D. 324–420

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, or seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you'll get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man. —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

We suffered for our art. You have to suffer for our art as well!

It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.

I've never liked euphemisms. I don't say "passed away." I say "dead.

If you concentrate, there is something that emanates from you, and that's what the great photographer photographs. Diana Vreeland says, "There is no beauty without emotion." I think that is the responsibility of a model.

Craft goes only so far in explaining how an artist uses his gift, and the gift itself is often inexplicable. Autobiography provides an alternate route—a seeming detour that may ultimately tell us something about an artist's sensibility and the experiences that shaped it.

If I'm anything, I'm not a singer, I'm a song stylist.

Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.

Poetry was alive and dangerous.

Whatever fills the heart eventually will be spoken, because the mouth is the faucet of the heart.

Writing is the only place I can be myself and not feel judged.

The degeneration of conversation into monologue, dogmatic assertion, is barbarism.

Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out. . . . No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.

Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.