Quotes About Expression

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness.

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.

One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.

My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that's just the way it is.

I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.

I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness.

And if the world does turn, and if London burns, I'll be standing on the beach with my guitar. I want to be in a band, when I get to Heaven. Anyone can play guitar, and they won't be a nothing anymore...

The reason you create music or art or write is in order to put things in a way you can possibly deal with them, and death is one of those areas... If you're accused of being morbid or bleak then you're onto a good thing, I'd say. Our culture is the most fucking desperate culture, desperately trying to avoid anything vaguely depressing.

If you cannot sing like the lark and the nightingale, sing like the raven and the frogs in the pond. They sing as God has given them to sing.

A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Here is woe, a self and not the mask of woe.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Books may preach when the author cannot, when the author may not, when the author dares not, yes, and which is more, when the author is not.