Henry Rollins Quotes

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.

By the time I got writing 'Halcyon,' I was on a roll, and I realized I had so much to write about, I realized I had so much built up inside that I couldn't really alleviate before, and then all of a sudden it was like reservoir burst.

Any of the rewards or accolades or any of that are very nice and everything but the music is what saves me. And it did. I would write my way out of any kind of depressing period.

The artist writes, paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.

When I need to exorcise a demon, I grab whatever score is going to house the song I need to sing out of my system, and I sing it.

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.

Art is like a fart for the soul. Better out than in.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.

My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly - and worse - of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" - still the "darkness" is majestic.

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

I wrote from the time I was four. It was my way of screaming and yelling, the primal scream. I wrote like a junkie, I had to have my daily fix.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.

I tried to find a way out in many ways, but it all caught up with me. Once I realised I could sing and write songs, it was just so much easier to do than anything else!

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.