Quotes About Expression

She stopped typing. If she'd been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn't a satisfying equivalent with e-mail, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it.

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent.

A beautiful woman combining the prospect of happiness and nakedness in the same spoken sentence could achieve the power of the greatest lyric poetry.

What came first _ the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?

Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don't you? It's only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

The anger was clearly real, though. It was in there, sloshing around, looking for the nearest hole to escape through.

We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That's the thing about television comedy, isn't it? It makes us all a part of something. That's what I love about it.

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a fuck.

When they – I cannot bring myself to use the first-person plural in this instance.

There aren't any buts," said Bill. "That's the whole point of being a writer, isn't it? If I wanted buts, I'd go and work in a fucking but factory.

Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn't tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.

Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented

When I say that you can hear God in 'One Man Guy' by Rufus Wainwright, I do not mean to suggest that there is an old chap with a beard – a divine Willie Nelson, if you will – warbling along with them.

Even the Brazilian way of celebrating a goal - run four strides, jump, punch, run four strides, jump, punch - was alien and funny and enviable, all at the same time.

I'm going to take every chance I get to make a nuisance of myself when somebody I admire is in the vicinity...

But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. [...] This is me. I wanted to say when I read Tyler's rich, sad, lovely novel. I'm not a character, I'm nothing like the author, I haven't had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if I ever found my voice.

Songs undressed like that, without a stitch of Stratocaster on them, are scary – you have to work them out for yourself.

So putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people.

Annie, meanwhile, was still trying to twist her mouth into a polite smile. It would take her five minutes to complete the smile, and probably another twenty-four hours to produce an accompanying snappy verbal response.

What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?

She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory was is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.

What I reckon is: everyone's a loony. However normal anyone seems, deep down inside they're actually mental, every single person in the world and the whole of your life you have to learn not to seem mental to other people, who are all mental, too… If you think how babies act – we really don't stop being like that. Everyone wants to scream loudly, and grab things without asking and break them, but it's not allowed, is it?

I should have said any of those things. I should have used at least one obscenity. I should certainly have threatened him with violence.