Anais Nin Quotes

I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.

It's hard to make great art when you've got too much pressure.

If I don't feel anything, I don't write music.

Fighting to get up in the morning, fighting to get on stage, fighting to make music that makes people feel good when I don't - that's been a struggle.

The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

When I can no longer create anything, I'll be done for.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.

I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.

Art is a war - between ourselves and the forces of self-sabotage that would stop us from doing our work. The artist is a warrior.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures

Artists are all giving so much of ourselves to the work and the people and the press and the media and Twitter and all that now. For me, being able to create from a genuine place is really difficult lately because there's so much going on all the time, but when all that stuff gets quiet, you can explore your ideas without any ego or mental chatter.