W. C. Fields Quotes

I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.

People who paint, including myself, get to a point where a bit of angst comes in. If you're doing it for a living, it's worth it to suffer those slings and arrows.

What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.

On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.

I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.

I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

I don't think that my music without pain is good music - and I wouldn't know, because I haven't made any music without pain.

Our wishes are our most reliable mirror, and the black-and-white movies I'm most drawn to are about artists who suffer because art is a noble thing; suffering is such a small price to pay for the imagination.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyone else could do this better than you can.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward - I ask for no reward - only to live & to hear my work.

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

Our bodies are but the anvils of pain and disease and our minds the hives of unnumbered cares.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!