Artistic Temperament Quotes

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

Painters are noted for being dissipated and wild.

His [Michael Jackson] behavior was weird, but when you get an artist and a genius, many of the geniuses throughout our whole history were weird. And they did weird things because none of us could understand what was on their mind and why they did what they did.

Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time... Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

I think people who are artists, actors, singers, great songwriters, they tend to have a hyper state of emotion where they feel things very, very deeply, probably more deeply than the average person walking down the street where it may affect them, but not to the same extent.

He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up.

All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

You can't be a proper writer without a touch of madness, can you?

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.

I don't think I'd get caught up in the crazy side of the music industry because it's just not in my nature.

The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.

Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

I'm really a classicist at heart - with a bit of madness!

One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

Creative people... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.

Artists are the worst [people]. They are selfish, self-centred; they don't care what happens.

Working with the artist elite can be like banging your head against the wall.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

People who make good music aren't necessarily nice people.