Quotes About Expression

I want a film which really hurts your eyes.

No text without inspiration

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

Shiny musical instruments wailed, their mouths open like lilies.

I heard you laughing,' Jack said. He wanted to say something about the quality of that terrible laughter, but he did not know how to begin. So he said, ' I've never heard anyone laugh like you do.

That was what happened to laughter when you caged it. It became unbearably sad. It was worse than crying.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

There are three reasons why men of genius have long hair. One is, that they forget it is growing. The second is, that they like it. The third is, that it comes cheaper; they wear it long for the same reason they wear their hats long.

Design is not for philosophy it's for life.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature…. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

How well I would write if I were not here!

The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can't make anything.

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?

When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.

Il bassotto alzò il muso verso di lui, con lo sguardo dei cani quando non capiscono e non sanno che possono aver ragione a non capire.

Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.

This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!