Quotes About Expression

Why is a hard question to answer in any langauage.

when courage dies, creativity dies with it.

Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in black magic marker) because they were having an argument and 'he yells louder than me' and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.

since when did creativity become a suffering contest?

Just write anything and put it out there with reckless abandon.

as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

When I talk about "creative living" here, please understand that I am not necessarily talking about pursuing a life that is professionally or exclusively devoted to the arts.

Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, "No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of the forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly . . . it begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations? I

His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it. We make things because we like making things. We pursue the interesting and the novel because we like the interesting and the novel.

Artists, by nature, are gamblers. Gambling is a dangerous habit. But whenever you make art, you're always gambling.

If what I've written here ends up helping you, that's great, and I will be glad. That would be a wonderful side effect. But at the end of the day, I do what I do because I like doing it.

But to suggest that nobody ever made valuable art unless they were in active emotional distress is not only untrue, it's also kind of sick.

We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours.

I realized as a songwriter that all I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

When I don't know what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought.

You can always find girls who can dance like angels, and some boys, too. But to get a man who can dance like a man—that's not easily found. This kid is everything I'd hoped he would be.")

Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life. Create whatever you want to create—and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it's exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that's awesome.

You can live a long life, making and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.

why is a hard question to answer in any language

Creativity is a gift to the creator not just a gift to the audience.

He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz)

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you have to let it go. Some songs just aren't serious about wanting to be born yet, Waits said. They only want to annoy you, and waste your time, and hog your attention—perhaps while they're waiting for a different artist to come along.