Selected expression quotes

1. Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other - it doesn't matter who it is - and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.

2. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

3. Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

4. In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

5. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

6. The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

7. There's nothing on my mind that couldn't be expressed by a long insane outburst of hysterical rage.

8. I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

9. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

10. The piano is always true to me. In times of despair, happiness, and joy, its mood is always my own.

11. Let the spirit out - Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one's bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will.

12. The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world, to state in aesthetic creation the deepest psychic and personal experiences of a human being. It is to enable those experiences to be intelligible and generally recognized within the total framework of an ideal world.

13. Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

14. I just draw what I think is funny, and I hope other people think it is funny, too.

15. All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

16. The truth is always modern and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice.

17. It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.

18. I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

19. Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

20. Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

21. Good music is very close to primitive language.

22. It is not about which artist is more skilled than which other artist. It is about creating what is in you to create. A lack of confidence in oneself is like a thief, It steals from the world that which might be worthy.

23. The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

24. The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.

25. Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.

26. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

27. Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

28. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

29. Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.

30. In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

31. There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

32. Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

33. My show is my statement. What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?

34. Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.

35. I don't make love by kissing, I make love by dancing.

36. A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

37. To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

38. A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

39. My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

40. All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

41. Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

42. Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

43. To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

44. Music is the shorthand of emotion.

45. The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

46. Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

47. The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

48. The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.

49. To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

50. An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

51. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

52. Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

53. O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap, I love to wear you cocked askew, to play and burst in song throughout our lives, and so rejoice our hearts.

54. Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological execration I could think of.

55. Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.

56. A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

57. Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.

58. In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.

59. Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization.

60. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

61. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

62. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

63. All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.

64. One should express his viewpoint regarding what he performed in his country and in a vast part of the world with great respect and deep thought.

65. I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

66. Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

67. Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

68. The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

69. Enjoying your work is essential. If your work becomes an expression of your own ideas, you will surely enjoy it.

70. In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

71. The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

72. In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

73. On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

74. Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity.

75. Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

76. The more ugly, older, more cantankerous, more ill and poorer I become, the more I try to make amends by making my colours more vibrant, more balanced and beaming.

77. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

78. There is no must in art because art is free.

79. The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.

80. He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

81. There is a smile of love, And there is a smile of deceit, And there is a smile of smiles In which these two smiles meet.

82. It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.

83. Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

84. The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.

85. In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times.

86. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!

87. Styles tend to not only separate men - because they have their own doctrines and then the doctrine became the gospel truth that you cannot change. But if you do not have a style, if you just say: Well, here I am as a human being, how can I express myself totally and completely? Now, that way you won't create a style, because style is a crystallization. That way, it's a process of continuing growth.

88. Put on your red shoes , and dance the blues.

89. Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment - and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.

90. The essayist ... can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast...

91. What the artist wishes to do - as far as you are concerned - is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

92. Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.

93. We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

94. The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

95. We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.

96. When you sing in English and Spanish, it's two completely different forms of expression and . . . even the people who don't speak Spanish love to hear me sing in Spanish.

97. It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

98. Though old the thought and oft expressed, 'Tis his at last who says it best.

99. If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book ... that's no fun at all.

100. The best prayers have often more groans than words.