Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

everyone who is human has something to express. Try not expressing yourself for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter, or draw a picture, or sing, or make a dress or a garden.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

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

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe. It hardly matters, though. The termite that asks itself why it keeps chewing risks becoming sluggish and inefficient, as does the writer who grows self-conscious in the middle of chapter five.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

Never strive, O artist, to create what you are not irresistibly impelled to create!