Creative Anguish Quotes

If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.

O ye dead Poets, who are living still Immortal in your verse, though life be fled, And ye, O living Poets, who are dead Though ye are living, if neglect can kill, Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill, With drops of anguish falling fast and red From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head, Ye were not glad your errand to fulfill?

The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust.

Because to write, one must truly suffer.

It's no surprise to me that intellectuals commit suicide, go mad or die from drink. We feel things more than other people. We know the world is rotten and that chins are ruined by spots.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.