Quotes About Expression

I even, to my own amusement if no one else's, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

Nova shrugged, looking as if she had personally invented shrugging and hadn't quite sorted out the fine details yet.

My name," the boy said importantly, "is Stacey de Lacey." "But that's a girl's name!" blurted Oliver. Stacey de Lacey's face turned a dark shade of red. "Silence!" he shouted. "Stacey is one of those names that can be for a boy or a girl! Like Hilary, or Leslie, or...um... Anyway...!

He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.

But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.

The Council of Nicæa. An ecumenical council was a new experiment. Local councils had long since grown to be a recognised organ of the Church both for legislation and for judicial proceedings. But no precedent as yet prescribed, no ecclesiastical law or theological principle had as yet enthroned, the 'General Council' as the supreme expression of the Church's mind.

"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.

One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

To rehearse imaginary conversations on paper is called literature. To do so out loud is called madness.

For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

The guitar has shown us again and again: Three chords can rock the world.

If you pick up a guitar and it says, "Take me, I'm yours," then that's the one for you. —Frank Zappa

music gives me a structure to think about how the world could possibly be.

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

No dictatorship has ever approved of jazz.

He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?

While the credits roll he says: That scene with the chain saw was great, wasn't it? I look at him and joke: Yeah, I almost grabbed you at that moment. He smiles back at me and I receive his smile like a gift. There weren't many times Thomas smiled at me like that. It wasn't his way.