Loss of Inspiration Quotes

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

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 idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.

You know, people would always ask me, 'How long is Primus going to go on?' And I would say, 'Until it isn't fun anymore.' At the end of the '90s, it just wasn't fun anymore on many levels.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

I believe an artist dies twice. The first time, it's just terrible - I've been there when the phone isn't ringing for years.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

We got sick of interviews and performances - for a long time, it came back to doing 'Take on Me.' It became a circus number instead of music.

I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that ... the creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn’t produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.

Desperate? So what? I'm desperate, too!" Fenoglio snapped at her. "My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here," he said holding them out to her, "don't want to write anymore! I'm afraid of words Meggie! 'Once they were like honey, now they're poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn't love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I'm it's creator!

Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

I've listened to a lot of outside stuff and just haven't really heard anything that moves me. I don't know if I'm getting old and crotchety or what.

Mr. Fulbright hasn't said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column.

The essential truth is that sometimes you're worried that they'll find out it's a fluke, that you don't really have it. You've lost the muse or - the worst dread - you never had it at all. I went through all that madness early on.

As for the reasons behind my retirement, they mostly center around simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer, or at the very least ease into the graveyard of mediocre cartoons.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

For so long, we had to write to pay a bill, we had to write in many instances where maybe you weren't even inspired to write because it was your job. That's how passion, creativity, and love gets killed.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

I ended up becoming so self-conscious that my songs stopped being about my life and started being about what people thought of my music. And that was really bad.

I had taken some of my solo music into the record label. They didn't really care for the direction I was moving in and I found it really disheartening. They wanted a pop hit, which I understand in terms of making money. I get that. But what they were going to ask of me was something I wasn't prepared to deliver and I felt kind of trapped. I just stopped writing. I just stopped. It was stifling.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.