Glenn Ligon Quotes

I don't express a lot of things that I feel; I kind of register things.

Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.

...there's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

My father would often start to say something, then say 'Forget it.'

A woman seldom writes her mind but in her postscript.

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

I have a certain sensibility that I bring to my writing that comes from knowing two things: what I as a reader like to read, and what as a writer I am capable of. I know my own limits. I know there are things I cannot do.

Supposedly I'm impossible to talk to. But it's honestly not me being difficult. Sometimes you just don't have a lot to say.

It's not so much about what you ask as what you don't ask.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

My emotions lose their force when I endeavor to interpret them, and my words seem very inept.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

Nobody really knows my true feelings on a lot of issues.

You can only sit on the frustration of wanting to express something for so long.

Before I got into stand-up, I was a really quiet guy who had all these thoughts, all these things I wanted to say, but there was never anyplace for me to say them because my mom would look at me and go, 'You better not say what you're thinking. You better not.'

It's interesting when you write something for somebody else, and then you're like, 'Oh man, I just laid my whole trip on them, and they don't even know!'

My shyness probably defined the first 30 years of my life, really. It's a crippling thing. It can be very lonely knowing that you've got things to say, but you daren't say them.

What I think, a lot of people think. They're just too afraid to say it.

It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

You should not want to know the things in people's minds. If you were meant to hear them, they would be said.

It is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered.