Kanye West Quotes

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.

I think art doesn't have to be created in a period of misery, but it certainly helps.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.

I think often sadness is a great place to get songs from.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Pain is such an important thing in life. I think that as an artist you have to experience suffering.

I've never done an anguished painting.

I think suffering has always been an incentive for my creativity.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

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

There is this view that if you are not tormented you cannot be vital and creative. I would like to think that is not true.

THIS TORTURE Why should we tell you our love stories when you spill them together like blood in the dirt? Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor, or a fire we can’t see, but how does saying that push us through the top of the head into the light above the head? Love is not an iron pot, so this boiling energy won’t help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before I’m free of this torture!

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

So great was the extremity of his pain and anguish, that he did not only sigh but roar.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

All the best parts of art come from pain turned to celebration.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

I do my best work when I am in pain and turmoil.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

My advice is: if you've got to be miserable to write great music, then drive a truck.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.