Creative Exhaustion Quotes

I do so much music that it's like a fog, and I can't even remember all of it.

When you're doing 22 shows on network television, the writers are going on vapors towards the end and, as an actor, you're just trashed by the end.

I don't know if you've ever knit a sweater, but by the end of it, you're like, 'Ugh I can't wear this. I can't stand the color. I'm so tired of it.'

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

When I reach the point that I write Yesterday, then I can retire.

I don't watch scripted television, and I finally figured out why. It's my line of work, you know? It's what I do.

It's hard to get to the point where you feel motivated and energized to go back in and create new music when you feel like you've just drained yourself by pouring everything you have into the previous project. It would be nice sometimes to take a longer break in between projects.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

Yeah, I was in the phase for the last ten years or so where every record I made I said OK, that's the last one, I don't want to record anymore, I don't want to do this any more, I don't want to have a public life.

The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.

Frazzled and delirious, as I've just finished a new book of stories. I feel like Moses staggering down the mountainside with the tablets of stone.

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

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

After 'Frampton Comes Alive!' became a huge success, I really needed to take time off to work out what the hell just happened. Instead, I just kept working.

After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radiance of Tomorrow' pulling at me because of the first book.

I publish a piece in order to kill it, so that I won't have to fool around with it any longer.

Putting together two powerful sets is always difficult. After you really pour it out one night, it's hard to pour it out the next night.

It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

I thought I was done making CIA movies after 'The Bourne Identity.' I really had used my father's work in Iran-Contra on 'The Bourne Identity.' You get one experience like that in your life where you have personal exposure to something, and you put it in a movie. That's it.

A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.