If there's one theme in all my work, it's about authenticity and self-expression. It's the idea that some things are, in some real sense, really you - or express what you and others aren't.

Many Muslim parents are authoritarian, which leaves young men and women with limited spaces to express themselves. Self-expression and autonomy are regarded as symptoms of 'Westernisation.'

At 6 years old, the ice became a place for me to express myself. Because I was so shy off the ice, it became my safe haven, with music and freedom and self-expression. That was my emotional outlet.

Sadly, so many arts programs have been eliminated from schools due to budget constraints. These creative outlets are so very important, not only for a child's well-being, but also for self-expression and fun.

I always felt like if I lived in true authentic self-expression and lived in service and in support of many other people, I would be exempt from having to deal with yet another crisis in my life. I was wrong.

I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.

A huge part of my identity is being a woman, and that's really important for me, and that's a big part of my self-expression, so I think it's really interesting sort of exploring what it means if someone doesn't have that.

I remember walking into drugstores when I was younger and seeing all the hair color boxes on the shelves and just being so in awe. Having the control to dye your hair and change your look is such a part of self-expression.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Even with the beauty stories we put out, we saw there was an opportunity to address issues of representation, identity, self-expression. We created the community that we wanted to have at 'Teen Vogue.' We were willing to lose some to have more.

As an actress, I value and rely on peaceful self-expression, not only in my daily life, but also in my professional work. This is particularly true, as my commitment to the promotion of human rights is an integral part of my calling as an artist.

When I first started snowboarding, nobody trained off-hill. People weren't going to the gym and getting stronger. Snowboarding was more self-expression, like skateboarding. It was just something you went and did. It wasn't something you trained for.

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.

You can't deduce the personality of the potter from the pots. It's a thingy you've made and offered to somebody else for their use, and, believe me, a novel is like that. It's a made thing and ought not to contain a direct self-expression of the writer.

I don't really believe there is such a thing as bad fashion - it is all self-expression, which used to get me into trouble when I was a little girl because I think I started wearing heels when I was about ten, and I always refused to wear matching socks.

Often we're recreating what we think we're supposed to be as human beings. What we've been told we're supposed to be, instead of who we authentically are. The key about the creation of full self-expression is to be authentically who you are, to project that.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

My background isn't in social software; it's in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the Internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek, especially Dante and Shakespeare.

I wasn't a ballet baby. My first dance class was in an outdoor pavilion when I was three. It was called 'creative movement.' The teacher gave us chiffon scarves in beautiful colors. She turned on some music and said, 'Now go dance.' So for me, dance has always been about self-expression.

I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.

At Burning Man, the audience is the show: the boundaries between stage and public overlap and melt. Every form of self-expression, every fantasy... everything has a place. It's kind of a utopia, and everyone who sets foot in it is so impressed that they do their best to respect it and keep it alive.

I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of about being a woman who loves fashion. Fashion is a vehicle for self-expression, it tells the world who you are and how you want to be seen. If you use it as a canvas for creativity, then you might want to talk about it, you know? And I fully embrace that.

I actually think that self-expression comes, sometimes, from what you wear, and having the freedom to be able to wear whatever you want for whatever mood you want to wear it, but to not feel frivolous that all of those things that help you self-express have to be things that you're committing to forever.

My Barbies were usually naked. Once, I took their heads off, cut their hair, drew on their short, spiky hair with some markers, then stuck the heads on Christmas lights. Every year, we'd string our tree with those Barbie heads. It looked demonic. My parents were so cool - they saw it as a form of self-expression.

Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. To love is to see myself in you and to wish to celebrate myself with you. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. Love is an act of self-assertion, self-expression and a celebration of being alive.

A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to Parliament to the law.

He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity. He who seeks order shall find gratification. He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed. He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression. He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.

The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.

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