Quotes About Expression

The thing about my music is, there really is no point.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

Give a hippie too much money and anything can happen.

Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.

Being a musician enables a person to bend the notes and express things that are inside you, no matter what.

I have so many opinions about everything it just comes out during my music. It's a battle for me. I try not to be preachy. That's a real danger.

There's a lot of people saying we'd be better off dead. I don't feel like a satan but I guess I am...keep on rockin' the free world.

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

Rock 'n' roll is everybody's fucking music…I would certainly hope that it's the devil's music, but it's not just the devil's music. I think that's where God and the devil shake hands – right there.

Keep on rockin' in the free world!

you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.

Was there a person who existed beneath languages?

Always, I sensed the difference between others and myself in the power of my emotions, and felt ashamed that I was less calm than Mary, and less able than George to view matters with level-headedness. It was so difficult for me. I was too easily carried away and wished to hide this, for expression of feelings always drew frowns or gasps, and was generally viewed as something base and common, as well as inappropriate. I prayed often that God might make me good.

I was deeply wounded and knew not how to be wounded without dramatically reacting to the pain, or hiding it.

I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.

With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.

To each his own milieu. Enhance what was already in one's possession.

I try not to name too many labels - not because it's not cool, but because it starts getting political.

I don't make a film to make people like it. I make a film to make people think

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.