Quotes About Expression

I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.

A person may paint or talk about painting but he cannot do both at the same time.

If you talk about it, you probably won't write it

No one, in an open society, following the rules of that society, had the right to come between an idea and its audience.

Perhaps the Negro musicians had not been able to give enough because they were inhibited by her Southern-supremacy origins.

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn't get paid for it.

I want the Arabic Granada, that which is art, which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion.

It is almost impossible to think of something no one has thought of before, but it is always possible to add different frills.

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and gutteral signaling.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.

Shuffling her manly feet, shaking her head, she listed off—at the top of her voice, for the whole street to hear—the names of women who were happy with their husbands.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.

No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.