Quotes About Expression

And there's no point in me doing anything if I can't write about it," I continued. "It would be like . . . walking ten miles without my Fitbit on—a complete waste. I mean, I do do things I don't write about: I use the bathroom, I have sex, but I try to be quick about it.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid." —Jules Feiffer

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

always try to read form as content, style as meaning.

Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.

Paper is brain interface. Paul Saffo

Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

They have me singing in a reformatory. My singing would be enough to get me in, but I'd never be able to sing my way out.

Too many musicians — singers and instrumentalists — performed it so many times that it's hard not to just go through the motions of playing (or singing) the notes, rather than remembering that you have to turn the notes into real music.

We have but one weapon unimpaired and that is the weapon of speech, and not to use it . . . is treason to the oppressed.

Sorrow and desolation have their songs," wrote Douglass, "as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their happiness.

And for the whole system to be healthy, all parts of it must enjoy equal freedoms. And the most fundamental of all those freedoms is this: that persons must be free to read, write, say, and think what they will. Without that, all other freedoms are not merely meaningless, they are shams.

Of course. And you already know you have hers," Pei said. And then, whatever his culture might have demanded, he cleared his throat hard, harshly. "And mine," he said huskily.

the most fundamental of all those freedoms is this: that persons must be free to read, write, say, and think what they will. Without that, all other freedoms are not merely meaningless, they are shams.

Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

What I'm trying to say here is that all of my life I've made things that are like fragmented mirrors of the what I perceive to be the world. As far as I'm concerned the fact that in 1990 the human body is still a taboo subject is unbelievably ridiculous. What exactly is frightening about the human body?

Alliteration seems to offend people.

His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.

If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself

Not an insult sweetie. That was a thirteen word kiss.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos. Or maybe I'm just a bullshit artist.

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.

In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.