Quotes About Expression

A smile becomes you or perhaps you become you when you smile.

For westerners, the tattoo has always been a metaphor of difference.

We sing more colored than the Africans," boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him.

All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

My dad used to say that giving someone a poem is like gifting them a feeling. Everything will change from black and white into color.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Der sichtbare Zerfall ist Ausdruck für die Loslösung aus dieser Welt.

Gezichten kennen vele mimieken, die allemaal wel iets weergeven van wat daarachter leeft, maar het evengoed kunnen vertekenen.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

On this view, it is not only how we die—or face the prospect of our mortality, as phenomenologists like to say—but also how we inhabit language that singularizes us, that gives our identities a distinctive resonance.

Creativity facilitates the work of mourning.

I don't need the money, dear. I work for art.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point.

We are made of awkward.