Stephen Hough Quotes

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

No one really had to encourage me to become an artist; it was just something I knew I had to do. I was drawn to things that seemed impossible.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

I wanted to play music. I didn't think about where it would go or what it would do.

My compulsion is to create things.

I actually play piano and violin, but I don't have a passion for it. It didn't make me wake up in the morning wanting to do it, or go to bed thinking about it.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

I write songs because I have to write them, and if I didn't I'd be doing some other kind of music that didn't require a song.

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back. And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

When I taught art, I was always asked, 'How do you know you're an artist? What makes you an artist?' And to me, it's like breathing. You don't question if you breathe; you have to breathe. So if you wake up in the morning, and you have to realize an idea, and there's another idea, and another, maybe you are really an artist.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.

When you receive a script and it leaps out at you and it's breathing with its own heartbeat - I suppose when you read something like that it's not a choice of whether you do it or don't. It feels like it chooses you, so you just do it.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!