Quotes About Self-expression

It is more important to be free than to be happy.

If a girl wants to grow up to be a cowgirl, she ought to be able to do it, or else this world ain't worth living in.

Most people do not have the guts to direct their own movie - let alone star in it.

Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening. To limit oneself is a kind of suicide. To limit another is a kind of murder.

If he weren't a stick his own self, I'd say he had a stick up his butt.

What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.

You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way contradicting yourself.

If I write a book I do it mostly for myself for the child in me and for the adult in me. The criterion for my children's books is: If I were a child would I like it That's very egotistical but it's the same thing with my books for adults. I wouldn't do a book if I didn't want to partake and share. With a book I can do both: I give and I share.

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.

It was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines started featuring behinds and inner thighs as though that's all there is to a woman, well, I shut up altogether.

Whatever's burning in me is mine

llegar a un lugar donde pudieses amar lo que se te antojara —donde no necesitaras permiso para desear— era la libertad.

Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

belleza no era simplemente algo que contemplar, era algo que una podía hacer.

The writing is — I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.

Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own.

Well, don't let your mouth start nothing that your ass can't stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you." "I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.