Quotes About Expression

Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways—a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.

In fact, the idea of the paranoid style would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to people with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

One of the most impressive facts about the paranoid style, in this connection, is that it represents an old and recurrent mode of expression in our public life which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent and whose content remains much the same even when it is adopted by men of distinctly different purposes. Our experience suggests too that, while it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all but ineradicable.

Symbols become sacred to people because they represent loyalties deeper than words can express. That's why they hate to see their symbols violated.

The power of myth lies in its ability to represent ourselves to ourselves. A myth is a story that expresses, but does not explain a universal human experience...The best myths have immediacy. We get them, see ourselves through them. They are mirrors.

Why would a guy spend five years writing a book when he can buy one for ten bucks?

the tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.

Ce n'est pas un des miens non plus, a dit Bancroft un peu trop vite. J'ai choisi cet exemple au hasard. Il y a des choses, des désirs en chacun de nous qu'il vaut mieux étouffer. Ou au moins, qu'il est impossible d'exprimer dans un contexte civilisé.

The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. PABLO PICASSO

As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it.

Working with the morning pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.

Remember that even if you have made a truly rotten piece of art, it may be a necessary stepping-stone to your next work. Art matures spasmodically and requires ugly-duckling growth stages.

Making our art, we make artful lives.

The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results. The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Remember, there is a creative energy that wants to express itself through you";

The trick to finding writing time, then, is to write from love and not with an eye to product.

Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia, with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems, do little to support the life of the forest floor.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. C. G. JUNG

Without being acknowledged, they are often used as batteries by their families and friends, who feel free to both use their creative energies and disparage them.

The act of making art is both scary and healing. Art brings light to places that have remained dark. Art brings perspective. Making art, at any level, is an act of courage and an expression of faith.

Self-expression is something that does not—and should not—ever stop.

Most of us are really willing only to write well, and this is why the act of writing strains us.