142 Quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you.

To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter-isn’t that evolution’s climax?

I don’t have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I’m a form junkie.

Aren’t we all just shooting for a life where art matters?

There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.

I think I did it because I was hurting. I think I wanted to mark that hurt in the outside. I think I wanted to be someone else. But I didn’t know who yet.

The stars were never there for us – we are not the reason for the night sky. The stars.

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person’s life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don’t quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss.