Quotes About Expression

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Art is not a sack race.

When you say, "I fucked up," the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.

The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.

Nabokov once said that the price of being a writer was sleepless nights. But, Nabokov added slyly, if the writer doesn't have sleepless nights, how can he hope to cause sleepless nights in anyone else?

You know, few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim that they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn't annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

Lucien had complete creative freedom. It wasn't just a canard that an architect needed a good client to produce great art.

When did swearing become so easy? You still would never swear in front of your parents or most adults, but when you're with your friends it's like every fifth word. Why couldn't learning Spanish be that easy?

Victoria glares at him. 'It doesn't mean anything if you don't mean it.' Zach smiles. 'My dear, I never mean it.

Russell Bufalino's penetrating good eye stayed on mine. I moved back up in my seat. I couldn't show anything in my face. I couldn't say a word. That's not the way it works. The wrong look in my eyes and my house gets painted. Jimmy

He had that smile on his round, craggy face you get when you squint at the sun. He had muscle deterioration in his face that gave him a lazy eye. If you didn't know him you would think he was blinking or drinking. With his good eye he looked through his wide glasses into my blue eyes. Russell

Books are cold," declared Arthur Merwyn. They "allow no questions, offer no explanations... They talk to us behind a screen. Their tone is lifeless and monotonous. They charm not our attention by mute significances of gesture and look.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing is a simple way.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Please hear what I'm not saying