Lord Byron Quotes

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Genius is sorrow's child.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.

There's always a part of my brain saying: 'Stop getting comfortable. Don't relax.' Because I find it difficult to write when I'm happy. I have to go out there and get battered up and bruised to write anything. I have to feel something.

Art is a kind of illness.

Chronic pain can be very lonely. It can have a shame-based quality.

Artists have nothing to do with the deranged, vaguely connected actions of a few celebrated nutcases.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.

Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

There's a thin line between genius and insanity - and I always get labelled as being the crazy one.

Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

Writers ... I think ... live on that fine line between insanity and genius.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

Depression is a lot like that: slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearale. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getter older, about turning eight or about turning twelve or turning fifteeen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

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

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.