Quotes About Expression

When politicians and civil servants hear the word culture they feel for their blue pencils.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?

f]or most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon.

No había, por mi parte, falta de cariño ni dureza de corazón. Cuando escrutas tus sentimientos con un exceso de obsesiva atención, llega un momento en que se te escapan.

I believe the impulse to write comes out of a failure to communicate by any other means.

Era uno de esos tipos con una conversación increíblemente lúcida, pero que se paralizaban ante el teclado. Era extraño cómo algunas personas podían ser tan parlanchinas y expresarse tan bien cuando estaban de palique por la calle y, sin embargo, ser incapaces de escribir una frase con sentido aun cuando en ello les fuera la vida.

I've never been shy. I've just waited until I had something to say.

Se vio desconfiando instintivamente de las personas con las que contactaba y que más se deshacían en ayes y se ofrecían a ayudar «en todo lo que pudieran» sin especificar nunca en qué ni cuándo. La experiencia le decía que los que mejor expresaban sus sentimientos eran los menos aptos para hacerlo con algo que no fueran palabras.

Language is alive, and you can't put it in the freezer. But

We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.

I was never shy. I was waiting to have something to say.

That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.

The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful...

The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.

Our interest in sex is no longer to annihilate it, but to educate it, to find civilized opportunities for its expression.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

Until that night Lucille had believed that people say things in anger that they do not really mean. By the time the fracas in her dining room had ended, however, she had come to believe that what people say in anger is what they really do mean, but usually have the self-control to keep to themselves.