Quotes About Expression

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

Country's cool if you like that kind of thing, but it doesn't have the complexity or - what's the word? - subtlety.

Pantomime is a big thing in the cultural calendar of my country, you know. So subtlety's not my forte.

I like songs with a lot of heart and feeling and subtlety.

Because I write very simply, but inside the simplicity, there's a lot of subtlety. That's what I'm proud of.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

When you are trying to express things with metaphors and much more subtlety, that's when you are doing yourself a disservice by making a video.

Really, subtlety is what is really important to me and my work.

I grew up in a Southside suburb of Chicago. It was idyllic. But I was plunked into a family that was not artistic and didn't know how to deal with my emotions.

Most applicants to creative writing programs submit stories about the angst of their suburban childhoods.

I try to be careful how much I sing about the suburban house or whatever.

Great rock n' roll comes from suburbia.

How can I be a folk? I'm from the suburbs you know.

When you're 17 in the suburbs and know only three gay people, holding hands with your girlfriend is a proclamation.

I can remember in my early days of writing going to sort of writers' functions and parties and things like that, and I used to get very irritated because when people heard that you came from the suburbs, they had this notion that it was very un-cool to come from there.

Writing-wise, I started when I was 17. Whatever was bothering me, I could just write about it in a song. I was in the west suburbs of Chicago, then I moved an hour south, and then I went to school up on the South Side - Saint Xavier, though I was at Purdue for a second before I dropped out.

Frankly, I think that's something that black people in America have often done - finding ways under very, very difficult circumstances to be subversive, but also to push things forward. And I think that applies to music. I think it applies to dance. I think it applies to a number of things.

If I wanted to make a subversive record, it would be horrifying and insane.

Art is maybe a subversive activity. There is a certain rebellion when you are an artist at heart, even if only in the art of living.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

The reason people get afraid of writing real, honest journalism and fiction, and the reason corrupted people and demagogues are afraid of journalism and fiction and poetry across the world, is because it is a subversive form.

My dad was an actor, and he made it all seem quite magical. It felt like a slightly subversive thing, telling stories, when all of my other friends' parents were builders or bank clerks. It's always seemed quite magical to me.

I always say that drag queens are like an exaggeration of women, and I'm like an exaggeration of drag queens. People ask, 'Why do you do your makeup so differently?' and I always say, 'Well, in a subversive art form, ask yourself why so many drag queens do their makeup exactly the same.' If you can do anything, why does everybody do the same thing?

I've taken clowns into the war in Bosnia, the refugee camps of Kosovo, and none of those are any more important than clowning in a subway or an elevator or just walking down the street.