Quotes About Expression

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Absinthe is the only decent drink that suits an artist.

Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: " How beautiful that is!

Don't paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result.

Neuznávám žádnou jinou pravdu, kromÄ› pravdy umÄ›lecké lži.

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

The tired expression, 'What we need is a good war' was common enough: 'a good war' that would preserve the old world, conservative certainties. In

When God truly moves in your heart you cannot remain silent. There will be a fire in your bones, like Jeremiah, who said, "His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot." Jeremiah 20:9.

This music, transmitted by loud-speakers, made a masterpiece appear like an amateurish attempt at composition by nimcompoop

Only inferior minds speak or write in order to discover what they think.

But it was hard for Poetry to stay angry very long. Nearly everything anybody said or did reminded him of a poem.

Academic writers are bad writers for three reasons. First, they want to sound smart. "If the water is dark," goes a German aphorism, "the lake must be deep." Instead of using good words like smart, they choose sophisticated or erudite.

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Writing books hurts like no other kind of writing.

Writing Well by William Zinsser

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

there are a few acts more aggressive than describing someone else

The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

I've had a lot of very positive feedback about those stories, and seem to have struck upon something that most people feel. I can also tap dance, and don't know many other authors who can.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Color possesses me—I don't have to pursue it…. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.