Quotes About Expression

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

I let the actors work out their ideas before shooting, then tell them what attitudes I want. If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.

Sometimes commercial galleries ask for particular work to sell, but I try not to be bossed around by them. I didn't become an artist to get bossed around.

At a label, you are confined to the team you have, but I did all my solo work myself, and that makes you more agile and able to go into weirder corners.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. Its kind of self-therapy.

My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.

The essence of my work, and of me, is the softer side of a strong woman, and that goes into a number of different roles.

I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.

Of course, when you work with actors and when you work on a script everything that you know about the human experience can't possibly go in.

No matter how much utter disdain I have for the work of a particular artist, I would still rather that he had created those works than hadn't

When real work happens and that's when real art happens.

I don't know how to explain it." "Try words. If that doesn't work, we'll move on to interpretive dance.

Well, to aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily.

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.

I respect anyone who's honest to themselves and able to bring that into their work in an entertaining fashion.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.

I would love to work with the artisans and take it to another dimension, the same way I did in Haiti.

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

I wonder a lot about making things meaningful. You want to do meaningful work and make art, but you're making records, which is good, but you don't want to weight them - it's a very curious thing.

For me, I'm more of a songwriter than a guitar player or singer. And not having things to work on was really kind of nice.