Quotes About Expression

I've always kept a notebook in my pocket, I've always written stuff down since I was a kid.

When I was seven in Ireland I went to a barber's on my own with my pocket money and asked for long hair with spikes on top like Pat Sharp and they gave it to me.

I can make 10 jackets of the same colour, same two pockets and same length, that will look like 10 completely different jackets when you put them on. It's about the way they are cut - it makes them look and feel completely different and move differently, and that's a never-ending study. People who wear my clothes will know exactly what I mean.

Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time.

Art is not the kind of thing where you get what you put into it all the time. So I learned to not expect anything other than the sort of joy of having a poem in front of me.

The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.