Quotes About Expression

The pop world is cool, but I never really thought of myself as part of it or wanting to be a part of it because I'm on a label that's not really like that. They're not trying to dress me up, they're not trying to do things like that. I feel like I'm sort of separate from that, actually.

It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

I don't think I'm a great songwriter, but I think I've learned a lot about it, and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.

You give a poet a bucket of worms, he'll probably put the whole bucket on the end of the hook.

To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement o man.

It is quite clear that if left alone, babies will make attempts at speech. These attempts, however, show their own inclinations to utter something, and do not follow any existing form of language. It is almost equally clear that if a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.

When I saw her... my heart skipped a beat. Her expression was as open and trusting as that of a young child. Such purity is something never, ever seen at the court. Hieraglion is a mire of intrigue and deceit... yet there she was-- a simple, beautiful wildflower blooming in its midst. I wanted to protect her. Myself. With my own two hands.

It was her clothes that did it...they clashed violently with the buff distemper of the walls.

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

We all need to have a creative outlet - a window, a space - so we don't lose track of ourselves.

Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.

Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Ravished is a nice word found in sentimental novel. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was fucked .

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to

I learned words, I learned words; but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart