Quotes About Expression

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping , laughing... I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

And yet I shall try again: they are murdering me!--all right, all together once more: they are murdering me! and again: murdering... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.

sex is but the ancilla of art

Art is a divine game.

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

Literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic. The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature. Not ideas.

Je suis saine de corps, et absolument obscène dans mes pensées, ma parole, mes actes.

She combined a cool forwardness -the overflow of what I think is called "poise"- with a shyness and sadness that caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation of a professor of "speech.

I not only debar too definite a planet from any role in my story – from the role every dot and full stop should play in my story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart).

Every great writer is a great deceiver

She wore poetry.

Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a Lesbian.

if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.

Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it. Henri Matisse

If there is some red spot on one of my paintings it is unlikely to be the heart of the work. The painting was done regardless of it. You could remove the red and still the painting would be there. But in Matisse's work it is inconceivable that you could remove a spot of red, no matter how small without the entire painting instantly collapsing.' Pablo Picasso

One of the calamities of Christianity is our tendency to talk in ambiguous generalities.

there are two games involved in tennis: one the outer game played against the obstacles presented by an external opponent and played for one or more external prizes; the other, the Inner Game, played against internal mental and emotional obstacles for the reward of knowledge and expression of one's true potential.

Poetry is the human soul entire Squeezed like a lemon or a lime, Drop by drop into atomic words".

The prerequisite for writing is having something to say.

Tell all my mourners To mourn in red- Cause there ain't no sense In my bein' dead.

But was that why Negroes were poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns? . . . The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget.... It's more like that, thought Sandy.

No," said Oceola simply. "This is mine. . . . Listen! . . . How sad and gay it is. Blue and happy -- laughing and crying. . . . How white like you and black like me. . . . How much like a man. . . . And how much like a woman. . . . Warm as Pete's mouth. . . . These are the blues. . . . I'm playing.

Why did white folks think you could live on nothing but art? Strange! Too strange! Too strange!

All the problems known to the Jews today in Hitler's Germany, we who are Negroes know here in America--with one difference. Here we may speak openly about our problems, write about them, protest, and seek to better our conditions. In Germany the Jews may do none of these things. Democracy permits us the freedom of a hope, and some action towards the realization of that hope.