Quotes About Creativity

Next time we need to be on drugs and have lots of suffering and alcohol abuse going on while recording, I'm kinda picturing a Jerry Lee Lewis session from the mid Seventies.

I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed.

I'm attracted to artists like Frida Kahlo, because her work was her life, her questions, her outrage, her suffering, her pain. Everything is in her work.

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

For one thing, I don't think art needs to be about suffering; sometimes it really seems like it's only the art about pain that is interpreted as profound, and in my work for years I've really tried to deal with subjects that are substantial, not just fluffy, but presented in a more playful, approachable kind of way.

Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven't pushed yourself hard enough.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.

What can I say: I'm a writer - I enjoy forcing pain and suffering on my characters!

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.

In the late '70s, the conditions that bands had to endure were, shall we say, not as civilized as they are today. People were a lot more aggressive back then. So there was definitely a lot of suffering for your art. But I would argue that was a good thing. Generally, people make better music when they suffer.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

Anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination.

For me, songwriting is really where it's at. I turn to use the guitar just to help me write the songs. That's it. As a result, my guitar playing suffers pretty horribly.

I came out of UCB and, before that, punk rock, and the whole deal was you do it yourself. Get up and rent the space, get up and press your own records, get up and silkscreen your own tees, get it done yourself. That sort of self-reliance will only serve me. Any time I lose sight of that, my career suffers.

When one gets time duration, one becomes very restricted, and hence, creativity suffers.

Hip hop is usually a bunch of guys talking to a bunch of guys, in my experience. It's homosocial, not homosexual, in that it's almost always all one gender in a room where it's being created. That locker-room environment has an impact on the language. I think the music suffers 'cause it allows an almost cartoonish level of misogyny.

Nowadays you really have to pump out that blockbuster in order to have the luxury of getting a body of work, and that's sad because the work suffers. Today everything is based on money. The older actors, they inspire me.

If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then... like I was suffocating.

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.