Quotes About Expression

Music is universal; it speaks to people's souls on the deepest level.

The thing is, if you tell your story specifically enough, it becomes so universal. Just because you're a gay man singing an honest love song, people should know that it's about men and that they can still relate to it.

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,'_ 'tender' or 'universal.' But to the real question of what's inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that.

I've always wanted to be a real universal artist, one that every type of audience could relate to.

There is no universal coming out process, so far as I know.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

When I write I'm never really thinking about themes or the universal.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

When I speak of artistic universals, I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you wouldn't have different artistic styles - but it doesn't follow that art is completely idiosyncratic and arbitrary, either, or that there are no universal laws.

Sometimes I would write something that was so private, people would say, 'Make it more universal.' I never liked that idea. I always thought the more personal a song was, the more people would want to hear it.

I think I'm making music that's pretty universal.

Music is universal; it's healing.

Whatever I do, I do for the universal. It's not like an individual thing; it's not like something from me. What I present to the people is for all of us, you know. I present music for the people.

I never really thought about my music being universal. When I set out to write, it was just a feeling that felt good to me. I never thought about being able to reach everybody.

After talking to people and meeting them every day, I realize that a song can be written from one perspective with an objective in mind. What is crazy about it is that many different people can take one song a totally different way. That is so cool, since music is a universal thing and a very personal thing.

The subjectivization of the universal in art brings the universal downward on one hand, while on the other it helps raise the individual toward the universal.

There are a lot of great love stories. It's just the best thing. Why wouldn't you write about it? Why wouldn't you want to read about it? But it's hard to write about. It's weird to have such a powerful and universal feeling and hope that you can write that and make it real for people.

'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.

Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.

I hope that my lyrics have a way that they're so specific they become universal, and they go, 'Oh I've been there, I know what that's like.'

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

Hiding a talent is not exclusive to any one particular group of people: young, old, black, white, Latin. It doesn't matter. It's universal. The idea that you have a gift or talent is always kind of threatening.

Universal human characteristics are a good base for great art.

Design has become a universal medium for expressing ideas, raising fundamental questions, and addressing social challenges.