Quotes About Expression

Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they've yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises — in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.

it's not what artists touch that counts most. It's what they don't touch.

What he missed was "the lack of great sounding boards like John, Ringo, George to actually talk to about the music.

Anyone who calls it "sexual intercourse" can't possibly be interested in actually doing it. You might as well announce you're ready for lunch by proclaiming, "I'd like to do some masticating and enzyme secreting.

The points are not the point; the point is poetry.

Points are not the point. The point is poetry.

Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light. Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light. Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms.

Everybody's serious but me.

A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.

When I was green and blossomed in the Spring I was mute wood. Now I am dead I sing.

Inspired first by the need to keep the cameramen awake, Emeril started yelling as he added ingredients to dishes—"Bam!

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.