Suzy Menkes Quotes

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.

It's still difficult for me to watch my work.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning

Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

I'm sure lots of actors and creative people go through this, where you have some weeks where it's all going according to plan and some weeks where you're super frustrated.

Everybody faces a blank piece of paper, no matter what they've written or painted or composed before. I can't imagine approaching every single new project with-without doubt.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

You know, sometimes I get moments of inspiration when I'm writing something and then the task seems so daunting that it just kind of scares me away.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering.

But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Complicated feelings are fertile soil for creative ideas.

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

Creativity is always a leap of faith. You're faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.

I'm excited and terrified to write something new. I won't be writing about suburbia.