Aesop Rock Quotes

Many artists give up after a while.

Every so often, you have to do a show that makes you walk to your car with your head down, wondering what you're doing with your life. It's good for you, as long as you're not feeling that way every night.

I'll never be a good writer, and no chance of being a good actor.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

No one purposefully paints a bad painting. It's someone who's trying to do a good painting, but it's terrible. I have one with a matador, and the bull is going through the blanket. You can tell the painter didn't know how to paint it.

I just wanted to write about music if I wasn't going to make it.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.

I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio, we also needed to move into production... And yet I was sitting there in editorial going this is not working. I'm a failure.

Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.

There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.

I attempt to compose symphonies, although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless.

I don't really have any advice, other than to say it's the most appallingly difficult thing I've ever tried to do and I wish I had a better idea of how to do it. In my experience what you end up with is the by-product of your failure to achieve what you set out to do. It may turn out OK, but it wasn't what you meant and you've no idea how you got there.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.