Rei Kawakubo Quotes

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

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.

When you're heartbroken, you're at your most creative - you have to channel all your energies into something else to not think about it. Contentment is a creativity killer, but don't worry - I'm very capable of making myself discontented.

I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.

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.

The demons you have are what motivate you to make your art. This is what drives the detective, this is what drives the painter, this is what drives the writer: a conflicting urge to forget pain and at the same time remember it and fight for some kind of justice. I know these powerful things are inside of me and everyone in some way or another.

Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.

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

You can't be creative when you're completely happy.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

You don't necessarily have to be in misery to be talented.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection.

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

I've thought about the idea of, 'Can happiness and creativity co-exist?' So much of what I've done, I think, has been based on being dissatisfied or incomplete or lonely. The answer is, 'There isn't an answer, necessarily.'

Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

There are times when I've inhaled my work. There are artworks still inside of me.

I have tons of regrets, but I think that's one of the reasons that push people to create things. Out of their angst, their regret, comes the best from artists, painters and writers.

You have to remember you're an artist and get hungry.