Alain de Botton Quotes

I can't not write, if I don't then I get really depressed.

Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

I have a lot of repression. So repression is what I make movies about.

I think something I've been drawn to about the people I work with is that they seem to be - like me - people who are a little insane, and have to make music. It's not a choice they're making for the sake of vanity - like it's cool to be in a band.

I started writing diaries, and mine were horrible. Oh, the monotony. Oh, the angst. I said, 'I don't want anyone to find these!' I destroyed them.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.

If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.

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.

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.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.

Every pore of you is crying and you don't even understand why or what. I actually kind of died and got born again as a result of taking the meds and having a chance to, you know, build a life.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life.

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.