Quotes About Expression

We cannot afford to have lies in music.

Because of the many dimensions of forms of though which you can also put into physical form, you have the possibility to create much which we cannot fashion in the same manner.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are.

The Italians are very unmusical. If I go to a Protestant church in London or Amsterdam or listen to a black choir, I hear four-part harmony. Italians could never do that. In Italy, we all have to sing the melody because we cannot harmonise.

I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.

Nowhere does our Constitution say we cannot say something about another's religion. Nowhere does our Constitution say we cannot say anything that offends someone.

We are all human, and we are all able to listen to music that we cannot understand. I used to listen to English music like Notorious B.I.G., and I didn't know what he's talking about in all of his tracks, but I'm a fan. It's rhythm and a groove that makes me dance, so I'm convinced that my music can work in the U.S.

I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I've always been like that; I don't smile in any pictures.

An evil fate has deprived me of the full use of my right hand, so that I am not able to play my compositions as I feel them. The trouble with my hand is that certain fingers have become so weak, probably through writing and playing too much at one time, that I can hardly use them.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

It's a powerful thing to be able to write a song. Even the least powerful feeling - like insecurity - that makes you feel weak when you experience it, when you write about it, you are powerful.

I think it is the weak and the young and the minorities that you need to look after to get a healthy creative environment - to get a lot of choices, a lot of different styles of music, a lot experimental stuff that everyone else feeds off.

I used to sing SWV's 'Weak' every day when people would ask me to sing.

I can be anything I want when I do an album. I can be vulnerable, I can be weak, I can be nasty, I can be strong, I can be good, I can be bad. They're all in there - but in society you don't get to use all these personalities because you're trained.

'Pretty' is such a weak word.

For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.

You can actually have a pitch button, you know, to get people on pitch.

It's really hard to write personal songs. I'm not good at writing ditties because as far as writing hit songs that you pitch to the national artist, I just don't write that way.

Honestly, I envy painters, who can have a masterpiece in one morning. Or musicians, who can write something in 30 minutes and arrange it in an hour, sometimes. 'Cause with this, with writing, you can occasionally feel like a caveman, like you've been working with pitch and tar on this brush.

We always have to show our character on the pitch, and I show my feelings.

Sometimes you see me on the pitch, and you think I'm playing on the street.

Sometimes, the fact that you're a footballer makes you think that racism can't happen to you because you bring that passion and you express a lot of things. When it happened to me, I couldn't believe it, and in that moment, I decided to walk off the pitch.

You have to do your talking on the pitch. I don't talk much in England - mainly because of the language.

I like to have fun, but there are moments you need to show yourself, and that, for me, is on the pitch.