Quotes About Expression

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are the most insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

I don't think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.  Hopelessly doesn't seem to make much sense, does it?

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words

The pen is mightier than the paving-stone

it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.

The curves of your lips rewrite history

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfect uninteresting in what they are.

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation.