Quotes About Expression

What do you mean, speak louder? If I could speak louder, I wouldn't need a telephone.

He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how they would have done it.

Nijinsky got all his master classes over in a single line of explanation.

Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy—the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate—requires effort and character. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art.

Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't dare to express it. —SOPHIE SCHOLL AT THE WHITE ROSE TRIAL IN MUNICH, QUOTED BY RICHARD HANSER IN DEUTSCHLAND ZULIEBE (FOR THE SAKE OF GERMANY), P. 15

I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, VARIA, VOL. 1, P. 203

Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

The pasta was always al dente, an expression which could be pressed into service as the name of a ferocious gangster.

Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth.

To put it briefly, the secret is to put it briefly. But you always think that's what you're doing, until experience teaches you that you aren't being brief enough.

Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.

Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets.

Adornment is never anything except a reflection of the heart.

Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous

But I'm always true to you, darlin', in my fashion,Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way.

Swearing is an art form. You can express yourself much more directly, much more exactly, much more succinctly, with properly used curse words.

Don't ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman's reputation.

People who are perfectly sane and happy don't make good literature, alas.

To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.