Quotes About Expression

When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.

Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn't hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces.

The subject of food is like Chopsticks: almost anyone can improvise on it.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

We are creatures of story.

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices." [ Ten rules for writing fiction ( The Guardian , 20 February 2010)]

Write what I know, who wants to read that? If only our apartment was haunted or I was the tiniest bit possessed by the devil.

I wore all black because I myself am a pop of color.

She's sweet" means Asperger's. "She's outdoorsy" means lesbian. "Hmm" is Southern Lady code for: I don't agree with you but am polite enough not to rub your nose in your ignorance. "Nice talking with you" is code for: Party's over, now scoot.

All my life, I'd thought of having kids with the seriousness that I'd thought of taking a ceramics class. When I finally took one and came home with three beautifully glazed but warped bowls, my husband said: "You're not going to turn into a lady who makes pots, are you?" I was not. I kept the bowls and display them proudly—one holds fruit, one batteries, one loose change—but I had no interest in making anything else.

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

Men don't need linguistic talent; they just need courage and words.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image....

There are no rules. That is how art is born.

It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language.

where you swallowed a terrible silence.

You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is the basis of all art'. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around, everyday with impunity, but because without it, you will lose your life, ts detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.

Whatever it was that possessed him, he wouldn't have said it was love for that was a word outside his vocabulary. He just felt what he felt and the wind seemed less bitter and the sun brighter because of it.

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.

One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.

the poetic moment is a static one. It's watching through a window while the action happens elsewhere. And then the poet turns away from the window because the poem is done ... It cannot unflinchingly stare grief down. At some point, by necessity, or design, it must turn away.

For maybe this is how poetry can be of use. Though it can't move with us, we can move it between us, pass it among us, so it is held up by our voices, so it moves with our breath, our living breath.