Quotes About Expression

Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him The Jimmy. Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.

I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

Finally, it was time to go. At the doorway he said, as if it had just occurred to him: I don't understand how you can live here, and be an artist, among all this social noise and all of these people.

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

Don't give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!

Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, it's an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world —and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand— than by those surrounded by loved ones.

In America we are perhaps more accustomed to art that enacts the boredom of life with a side order of that (by now) overfamiliar Warholian nihilism.

but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1

People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence

Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyoncé is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The lesson is quite clear. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me.

Still, in the top left-hand corner, a huge button bought in New York's Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Finally, in the crowded third corner, stand the many people who feel rap is not music at all but rather a form of social problem. They have only one question to ask a rapper, and it concerns his choice of vocabulary. (Years pass. The question never changes.)

It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could "put it over.

Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say.

Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul.

Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare's ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we tend not to think of it that way, in Britain, instead we consider Shakespeare's breed of impersonality among the highest literary virtues.

Poezija rašoma ašaromis, apsakymai - krauju, o istorija - nematomu rašalu

The most sincere feelings are the ones hardest to be expressed by words." —Unknown

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.