Quotes About Expression

In school, some of my favorite subjects... I mean, art was my favorite subject. I loved art! I used to go during lunch time to the art room and paint or draw or something.

I want to make serious work that engages with serious subjects. I'm very lucky: I get to more or less make what I want.

Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.

I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.

If you look at my career... I couldn't possibly have chosen those subjects if I was thinking, 'That's a great commercial idea.' I'm not aware of a great musical where someone has done that.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

My aim is for every song to have a purpose - for you to be able to say, 'This song is about this.' But love and heartbreak are some of the most abstract subjects.

It's liberating to perform in another language. There are some subjects I would never talk about in French, where they see me as a public figure, that I talk about in English.

I will always face the conundrum that the subjects I'm attracted to aren't essentially commercial.

Take any movie from 'Khamoshi' to 'Black,' I was always clear about my subjects.

I do like to write about dark subjects.

I really love picking up subjects where people say, 'How is this going to work?' and trying to find a way to make it work because every story needs to be told.

My music reflects the time on which we live, both in terms of arrangements, as well as in the subjects treated in the lyrics.

Call me radical, but I've always thought there are at least two subjects on which journalists are absolutely entitled to express public opinions: freedom of expression, and attacks on journalists.

I'm saying that people who are enmeshed in situations of subjugation and have to live, have to find ways to project their dignity as human beings - in spite of all the efforts of those around them to degrade them - I'm saying that this music is the manifestation of the dignity in the life that has always been present.

I've studied several guitar players and songwriters, mostly from Al di Meola to Dimebag Darrell, from Freddie Mercury of Queen to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Bradley Nowell of Sublime.

When I got my first guitar, I played along with everything I heard that had guitar in it, like the Ramones, Nirvana and Sublime, as well as whatever hip-hop and R&B stuff was on the radio.

Whenever you write for someone else, you're always aware - sometimes overtly, other times at an almost cellular, subliminal level - of the rules about what you can and can't do.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Sometimes you get submerged by emotion. I think it's very important to express it - which doesn't necessarily mean hitting someone.

When I started making music, I was so heavy into the hyphy movement. That's something you only know so much about if you were right there living in it, submerged in the culture.

'Al Jamilat' is not just feminist. It's an album with songs that feature women: women who are in love, rebellious women, political activists, women who are more submissive, women who are in charge.

There's a certain way people are used to seeing nude women, and that's in a submissive, coy pose, not looking at the camera. And in this poster, I'm looking dead into the camera with no expression on my face. I think it freaks a lot of people out.

When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.