Quotes About Expression

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

Blimey, thought Kelvin, what an eye-to-face ratio. When you want to say something delicate, you don't want that eye-to-face ration staring up at you. Big eyes, like a child's or a baby seal's; the physiognomy of innocence--looking at Archie Jones is like looking at something that expects to be clubbed round the head any second.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.

for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.

am so angry at you right now.

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.

It's a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

when you're writing it's such an obsessive thing, and then when you're done it's like pushing something out of your body (...)

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do something. 20

But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.

Marilyn Monroe was pretty far along that curve, as close as one can come to dancing while still walking. In her classic 1953 movie Niagara she takes a legendary walk away from the camera, hips swinging—roiling—in a mode long since memorialized by catwalk models, drag queens, prima donnas, freaks and queers, street punks of all persuasions.

but to create a real feeling—made

And now I found I couldn't stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I'd released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach.

Writing is routinely described as creative —this has never struck me as a correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb(I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I

the surest motivation I know, the one I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away - as it is at the moment - seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it's something to do. [...] Why did you bake that banana bread? It was something to do. Why did you make a fort in your living room? Well, it's something to do. Why dress the dog as a cat? It's something to do, isn't it? Fills the time.