Quotes About Expression

I'm normal. I just had a different occupation for a while, and when you're in a different occupation, you have to carry yourself a different way. Most of my art is me bringing you stories from that era of my life. My life now is kind of boring.

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

Art is not what most people think it to be. It is not an occupation of one-railed people.

Ever since I could first write I have been doing so. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy.

In fact, the element of play has an important role in my life, and I think that should be the case in the life of every artist. Our life is occupied with playing, whether we play an instrument or a role.

As a transgendered artist, I have always occupied a place outside of the mainstream. I have gladly paid a price for speaking my truth in the face of loathing and idiocy.

Let every writer tell his own lies That's freedom of the press.

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.

Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers' lives.

There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York. (on Tom Wolfe)

Having reshaped my words with an intensity of feeling I had not known before, I could not understand why others were not overcome with my sense of life, of sex, and of sadness.

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.

Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.

You men are a bunch of god-damned women.

I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.)

No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing.

A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, complacent, fearful, overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration will be revealed in his book.

One's own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam.

The words we speak have a direct and definite effect upon our thoughts. Thoughts create words, for words are the vehicles of ideas. But words also affect thoughts and help to condition if not to create attitudes. In fact, what often passes for thinking starts with talk.

According to Scripture, the world we live in is God's creation. It is the visual, fragrant, audible, touchable, and tastable manifestation of God's love, the place where God's desire that others be and be well finds earthly expression.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]

Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.