Quotes About Expression

I didn't feel like there was anything incompatible with my love of gangster rap and my spiritual aspirations.

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.

If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.

she has a blank sheet to write upon.

The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can't say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and that you can't do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can't talk.

Language has a creative character: it is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstance but not caused by them – a crucial distinction – and can engender thoughts in others that they recognise they could have expressed themselves.

The interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many... somethings. So, thanks.

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

I think the hardest thing about writing is writing. [Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]

I think you often have that sense when you write-that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Write everything down. Keep a journal. Take more pictures.

Most everyone wears black--except for anchorwomen, United States senators, and residents of Texas, and I feel really bad for them. I mean, black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.

I didn't speak French well at all and did these terrible interviews in pigeon French.

I had always zipped through that part of the speech as if I had somehow managed to be invulnerable to the fantasy, as if I had somehow managed to escape from or rise above it simply as a result of having figured it out. I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

Oh, go to hell. But there wasn't any heat in the response. You're not supposed to smile when you say that.

I don't think you tell someone you love them because you expect something. I think you tell them because you have something to give.

A kiss isn't terminal. It is the way you do it.