Creative Void Quotes

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Blank paper always symbolizes the anxiety of the painter.

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.

I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.

At the end of a project I get very weird, you know, in my head because I'm not doing it. It's like an addiction. I have to do it.

There's been a big black hole in the middle of the country as far as TV production goes.

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.

My experience of emptiness is that it is alive with the possibility of everything waiting to be born

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

When I'm not writing, I feel an awareness that something's missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There's something vital that's not happening.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

If I wrote what I really think, I would be so sad all the time. We create to fill a gap - not just to avoid the idea of dying, it's to fill some particular gap in ourselves.

Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.

Adam Yauch started the band. It's not like a thing where we could continue without him.

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?

That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening.

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

I'm a hippie child of the '60s. What drives me crazy about mass media entertainment is that it's so often devoid of any ideas.

Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.

When you work on these films for so long and so intensely, when you get to the end of them, suddenly there's nothing to do.

I don't really have any ditties left in me anymore.