Aldous Huxley Quotes

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

Not to be a bummer, but heartbreak is great for inspiration - we all know that - and it's really hard to write songs if I go through a phase where I don't feel much.

As songwriters and artists we get a lot of attention and gratification when we write about the moments that have hurt us, and in turn, sometimes we'll seek out more hurt so we can write more things that people like.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.