Quotes About Creativity

That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?

I can't imagine a world where I wouldn't have the means of expression. When I talk to people who don't, it seems like they're really unhappy.

I know for a fact that a lot of actors are desperate and unhappy if their careers are not progressing at what they think is the correct rate. They just go crazy if they're not working. I don't feel I'd be that way. You can always get a few people together and put on a play. Maybe not in New York or L.A., but in a lot of other towns, you can.

The first record I made, when I listen to it, I understand. I understand perfectly well why certain musicians were unhappy with me. I had to decide: was I unhappy with me? I liked it. If they didn't like it, it was on them.

If you're unhappy, you can't make anything.

I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.

People who write happy songs are often unhappy.

That was the impetus for me to do music or art, because I knew if I didn't try when I was young, then I would get to be in my 40's and I'd be really unhappy that I hadn't.

We had our unhappy moments but they got channelled into the kind of sadness that was necessary for singing a song about going nowhere. So it worked out very well I think.

I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

The end of the Nineties was an unhappy Primus camp. I hit a creative stagnation that wasn't helping us forward, and the personal elements, it just was time to stop.

I need to find creative diversity because if I get stuck, I get unhappy.

I think most music provides the same messages - whether it be 'I'm unhappy' or 'I love a girl.' I just liked the package of rap music.

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.

I believe as musicians and artists we have an obligation to our souls. What that is? Only each one of us knows. I can speak for myself and say my obligation is to be happy. When I'm happy, I make great music. When I'm unhappy and my heart is broken, I may make brokenhearted music, but it still sounds good.

You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.

I made two movies very young, and then I had trouble getting a movie made, and so - which was both, I think, a plus and a minus. It was a minus because it made me unhappy.

Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.

I'm less crazy and unhappy when I'm writing.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.

I'm always going to be looking for something artistically or whatever. I think that's part of being driven, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm unhappy.

My childhood was extremely unhappy. That's not to say that my parents didn't love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn't come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.