Quotes About Expression

The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....

whether the American people knew where they were driving." He suspected they did not, "but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.

A poet," he liked to say, "can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.

He oft finds med'cine who his grief imparts But double grief afflicts concealing harts

Leaves, lines, and rhymes, seek her to please alone, Whom if ye please, I care for other none.

Later I would know some real workers—heavily tattooed, hair worn in ponytails, motorcycle-riding, manga-reading, and pill-popping—and I realized they were as batty as we were, far from the standardized robots of our fantasies. Americans, rich or poor, were a nation of weirdos.

for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.

I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.

And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn't sure of but that he mixed by feel.

I've always associated reading and writing with sex.

What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?

Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing—shirt, tie, jacket—felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles.

The celebration of current battles by poets who have not taken part in them has produced some of the emptiest verse that exists.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things

Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk," she said. "It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can't truly be sociable.

The punch was getting to them, their faces redder and small tiffs between couples

There was a cry that must have been mine

it was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed.

any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters.

You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.