Artistic Block Quotes

It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."

I always see nice images like that but I don't know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.

I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other. Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

When I cannot get that moment of truth where you feel yourself opening up like a flower, I absolutely loathe the bloody camera. I can just feel this black hole eyeing me, sucking me in, and I feel like smashing it to smithereens.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

I'll never run out of things to rap about. Sometimes you sit there and think, 'I can't do it, I can't do it.' Then something happens and you start writing.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered.

When you have kids and you're married...you know, life takes its toll on you after a while, and then you're just not as creative, you're not as motivated... And it takes a special person when it's time to dig down and do a record, to really go in there and pour out whatever it is you got in you to put on a record, and that's what we did.

To me, torture would be, "I can't think what to write in the next sentence. I'm stuck." Torture would be if you didn't have the next idea.

I have a tendency to postpone starting a piece until it's kicked around in my head a little bit.

I had writer's block for almost a year.

Right now I feel so inspired, it's hard to believe. I've written about 20 songs in the last two days. I'd gone about four months without writing a thing.

When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.