Quotes About Expression

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art

and in the end the logical thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were laboring for a reader today, but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself. I repeat: there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something...

I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art

how can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain?

Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture.

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

emotions of that kind ought to be more restrained, without violet irises and crying violins.

Tropes are the dreams of speech.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He

Las aptitudes artísticas no son caracteres sexuales secundarios, como han dicho ciertos charlatanes y chamanes, sino todo lo contrario: la sexualidad está al servicio del arte.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

Las regiones apacibles y vagas en que me movía eran patrimonio de los poetas, no el terreno del crimen

But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge.

Oh no, I do not gloat over my own person, I do not get all hot wrestling with my soul in a darkened room; I have no desires, save the desire to express myself — in defiance of all the world's muteness.

Tengo la habilidad de verter torrentes de lágrimas evocando tempestades pasadas

I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

As palavras sem a experiência não teriam qualquer significado.