Quotes About Expression

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

Not everyone is an artist but everyone is a fucking critic.

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately (forms of) expression... for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my (art) against such contamination.

L'art est justifié dans la mesure où il ajoute à la vie juste ce qui lui manque pour être plus vraie qu'elle-même.

Tout bon livre est un attentat. [in Essai sur moi-même]

To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words

Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.

J'avais surpris mon cher surhomme en flagrant délit d'humanité : je sentis que je l'en aimais davantage. Alors, je chantai la farandole, et je me mis à danser au soleil.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

one might almost say that works of literature are like artesian wells, the deeper the suffering, the higher they rise.)

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.