Dante Gabriel Rossetti Quotes

When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn't be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

All artists are two-headed calves.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

If you stop your creative process every time you think you need to cheer yourself up, or rid yourself of emotional conflicts, your life will be over before you can create anything of any real significance.

My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.

A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of the as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is mere vanity and vexation of spirit.

The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.

I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old.

I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

Art is a war - between ourselves and the forces of self-sabotage that would stop us from doing our work. The artist is a warrior.

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.