Quotes About Expression

I enjoyed the thought that hovering behind my work is a unifying belief system, just as there is behind Egyptian or Ancient Greek art. It just happens that the person who thought up the belief system behind my work is still around - ie, me.

Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.

It's unimaginable to me that I wouldn't write, but it's very imaginable that I won't write for a little while.

Whatever the raw material, the material itself is unimportant until it's catalyzed by emotional fervor. So in the ideal exchange between me and my listeners, they wouldn't 'figure out' my music. They would feel their pulse racing and the hair standing up on the backs of their necks.

What a writer's message is is totally unimportant. Either he is agreeing with life by affirming, or he is saying life is just a bowl of wormwood.

I can't stress enough how unimportant the camera really is. Any brand of camera will do. For 95% of my shots, the lowest end DSLR will be just fine.

I refuse to make uninspired music.

Fashion isn't interesting when it comes from an uninspired place.

Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse.

I've literally been in sessions with producers, writing for other people, and they're like, 'We need a song for this artist, and we need it to sound like this song.' They're literally saying, 'Rip off this song that was no. 1 last week,' and that's just so uninspiring.

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

There's nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be other things.

Being onstage and communicating with an audience was part of my life since I was very little, but I was never pushed into singing. My parents were so uninterested in me making music.

What was exciting to me in talking to Kogonada was I was just very convinced that he was a very real and pure artist. He was so uninterested in the commercial game.

I don't think that people are disinterested or uninterested in politics. I think very often they are disengaged from the formal political process. To some extent they are suspicious or even despairing of formal politics as a means to give expression and effect to what they want.

I've always been so uninterested in playing any kind of archetype of some pure, innocent, virginal woman. I just don't believe it.

I like to act. Every other aspect of show business I find uninteresting.

The idea of designing something that is like something else is incredibly uninteresting and boring.

I know I'm probably digging for fresh fruit in the garbage, and as much as anyone, my attitude is, if stuff's sincere, it's gooey and boring and uninteresting. But it's no way to live.

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.

For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.

I think it's appropriate in America for anyone to speak out and say what their reaction is to the president's State of the Union speech.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

I don't want to put a name on my music. Other people can put a name on what I do. It's just the union of what I've been listening to and what I've been learning. It has some elements of classical music, it has some rock, it has some jazz, but I don't want to give it a name.