Quotes About Expression

In his own way the modernist becomes as irrelevant as the fundamentalist. The fundamentalist has something to say to his world, but he has lost the ability to say it. The modernist knows how to speak to his age, but he has nothing to say.

An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.

the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.

Art is life, plus caprice.

Art is not the handmaid of politics. It is its own remedy! And its healing is sacral.

A poem is contained movement.

It is in the order of the imagination, the order of poetry, that the possible exceeds itself, is sanctified in excess.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

In literary composition a well-chosen quotation lights up the page like a fine engraving...

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it...

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow?

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

How like art is what's left over after life.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.