Quotes About Expression

Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.

Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting "get off the fucking road you fucking wanker" actually meant.

That was the price of human civilization—to create it, they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are.

But, as C.S. Lewis once put it, 'The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken".

The object of art is to give life a shape

Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option , I suppose , is that you write a book.

The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a shared world. This shared world we call 'language', Once we take our personal unseen experiences and make them seen, we help others, and even ourselves, to understand what we are going through. What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point. Words don't capture, they release.

I had never been one of those males who were scared of tears. I'd been a Cure fan, for God's sake.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.

That is why I write. I am just for ever running from madness.

For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling.

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

This was a life where she put four exclamation points in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.

Words – spoken or written – are what connect us to the world, and so speaking about it to people, and writing about this stuff, helps connect us to each other, and to our true selves.

The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn't be communicated in any other way. But all I can say is that I felt suddenly

What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point. Words don't capture, they release.

I do not like wearing clothes," I said, with quite delicate precision. "They chafe. They are uncomfortable around my genitals." And then, remembering all I had learned from Cosmopolitan magazine, I leaned in toward them and added what I thought would be the clincher. "They may seriously hinder my chances of achieving a tantric full-body orgasm.

As she stared at Voltaire's still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. Envy.

Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people's lives.

This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human.

Crying releases stress hormones. Swearing increases pain tolerance. Fury can motivate us into action. Feel what you feel.

when you write with a pen it is like writing with a part of yourself like it is another finger.

This was a life where she put four exclamation marks in a row. That was probably what happier, less uptight people did.

artist   A human who notices the ridiculousness of being a human and paints, writes, builds, sculpts, films, acts, plays, sings, cries about it.