Quotes About Expression

Because there's so much that just can't be said plainly. Try describing what beauty is - plainly - and you'll see what I mean.

Just as putting a gender on a being limits in some way the way we think about the being. By putting any kind of label on anything, we limit it.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

Shit is universal no matter which language.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

The art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.

Writing is freedom.

Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

He imagines they are uniformly smiling, showing the face they squeeze out with the toothpaste every morning.

If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.

She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.

I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.

A word is also a picture of a word.