Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

I truly find such a sense of peace and calm when I'm working, and it's an inner peace that I've never been ever to achieve, doing anything else. It's where I feel most myself. I can access my power and strength, as an artist, and I can't imagine not doing it. I love it!

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man. And that is the most bitter type of loneliness, success has brought me world idolisation and millions of pounds. But it's prevented me from having the one thing we all need: A loving, ongoing relationship.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.

I feel I must live alone, alone, alone - with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.

loneliness has its own needs!

I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely. All you really have that really matters are feelings. That's what music is to me.” – Janis Joplin

I paint all the time. Each night I wrestle, I paint my face because I am an artist. It's kind of all coming together where I am able to do everything I really love to do and need in my life.

The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.

Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world.

In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.

My dream is to do exactly what I'm doing. I love writing and directing, and being somebody that can write about an artist I love or make a film about it. That's great. I would leave the other stuff to those who do it much better.

I think doing something creative is the most important thing to me, and I think it's probably just good for the soul for anyone, whatever it is. You don't have to be a film director - you can do gardening or something - but I think everyone needs to create something.

To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.