Beatrix Potter Quotes

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

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

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

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means 'absolutely nothing' from the logical point of view.. ..should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.

I still have an insane drive to create and express myself, and it'll never stop because I don't know how to stop it.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.

I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs.

Music feels like a six sense to me, and it's never been just a hobby. It's something that I have to do to breathe. It's an extension of who I am.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

If I wasn't plagued by needing to write things, that would perhaps be a blessing.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

I think it all comes from the same source, really, the writing of music, the writing of words, the playing of music. It's what drives anyone to be interested in the arts. I think it's a poetic gene; it's a wanting to go beyond.

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.

When you receive a script and it leaps out at you and it's breathing with its own heartbeat - I suppose when you read something like that it's not a choice of whether you do it or don't. It feels like it chooses you, so you just do it.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.