Quotes About Expression

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

Language is the only homeland.

You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.

Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines.

The feelings I don't have I don't have. The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have. The felings you say you have, you don't have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring as the phallus, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited.

Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis.

And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang!

Anger cuts through a wide range of things. Cuts like a knife

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings.

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.