Quotes About Expression

Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.

Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.

Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn't be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem.

In front of us there is an immense garden of words and non-words, a serre, that is, a greenhouse in which are preserved by my care so many things of speech you have given me while leaving me free to cultivate them.

Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body, of life in its remoteness; to saturate the distance with desire; in order to keep it from reading you.

Woman must write herself and bring woman into literature

Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!

Écris, que nul ne ce retienne, que rien ne t'arrête : ni homme, ni imbécile machine capitaliste où les maisons d'édition sont les rusés et obséquieux relais des impératifs d'une économie qui fonctionne contre nous et sur notre dos ; ni toi-même.

My voice repels death; my death; your death; my voice is my other. I write and you are not dead. The other is safe if I write.

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs

I have volcanoes on my lands. But no lava: what wants to flow is breath.

Silence will not betray your thoughts but the expression on your face will. Humor has a hundred faces tragedy only a few.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

H. Havelock Ellis

Wear audacious underwear under the most solemn business attire.

Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation.

1425: When you really like someone, tell them. Sometimes you only get one chance.

[On Warren G. Harding:] He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It's abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there's only a small amount of stuff that's important, and then seeing what it was.

With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There's some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it.

The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying.

There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms." (p. 12)