Artistic Burden Quotes

I do not want to have the feeling of writing 'for eternity', so to speak.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

The condition of being an actress can be unbearable.

It's just that as a solo artist, I have more burden and responsibilities on my shoulders.

Especially when the expectations become so high of you, you always remember the last record that might have been really successful, and you're trying to outdo that or trying to make something that does not sound like the last record.

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

Contemporarily, we struggle with people worried about representation sometimes. It's a burden, as artists, that we take on that limits the work. It limits the characters people play. It limits the roles they want to do.

I have to be someone; maybe I'm just doing it for my father. When I made a movie, it had to be a hit because when he died, he was a flop director.

The second album was emotionally exhausting and my life felt like it had become very serious at a very young age.

It's a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

True artists are prophets. I don't want to be that prophetic in that sense because it's so lonely.

I'm the original hunter-down-of-fabulous-things. Twenty years ago I sat down and decided that I would create a really wonderful image, an unforgettable image. And now I'm kind of stuck with it. It's like when I don't wear my fringy, gypsy stuff, people kind of look at me like, 'What's wrong?

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

The unpublished manuscript is like an uncon-fessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition.

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer...When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep...An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

In some ways, I think 'Pulp Fiction' hurt cinema in a very, very minor, small way. It did a massive amount of good. But it also made it impossible to make a movie even remotely like it without someone comparing it to 'Pulp Fiction.'

I'm up to my ears in unwritten words.

Being an actor/ writer is a responsibility and a burden and a gift. The responsibility to me is that you can't just wait to be cast into something and then you create the role. You almost have a voice inside of you telling you what you might want to play and be able to play. It's hard, but once that thing comes out of the printer and you hold those warm pages to your cheek it's great. It's a huge sense of accomplishment.

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

Filmmaking is something I have to do. It's not something I particularly want to do.