Steve-O Quotes

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!

Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.

How hard could it be? Is it really going to hurt? You get into that deep well of emotion if you are by yourself. Why am I here? What's the point of going on? If I can't do what I want to do, then what's the point?

I've always felt like an imposter, in the whole, as a musician.

Many incredible artists die before they were famous.

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

It's so funny because all those years I was working, I basically always felt that whatever job I was doing would probably be the last one I would get. I really never thought that I stacked up with the other girls.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it.

I can't imagine going on when there are no more expectations.

One sometimes says: 'He killed himself because he was bored with life.' One ought rather to say: 'He killed himself because he was bored by lack of life.'

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

There are great actors we'll never see just because they haven't had my luck.

I remember having a conversation with my sister, saying, 'What if I don't make it? What if I'm still waiting tables when I'm 35?' I was just at the end of my rope. But I've been at the end of that rope several times.

I hated the thought of being just a songwriter.

I have no idea whether I'm any good or not. Still waiting, like most actors, for somebody to find out one day that I can't do it.

A lot of the most prolific painters died broke and weren't appreciated in their time. I'm trying to remember who exactly I was thinking of - like Rembrandt, van Gogh or Gauguin. Some of those guys, they got whole floors of museums to themselves but weren't really appreciated in their time at all.

I was always introduced as the Beatles photographer and I gave it up in the end. I was so unsure of myself. Am I good or am I just the Beatles photographer? People were not interested in what I did before. I could not stand it any more.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

What I would hope to do is painting, because I don't think I'm qualified for anything else. My last job would be babysitting, so I don't think Starbucks would even hire me.

The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not kill myself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybe I shouldn't kill myself.

Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.