Amy Lowell Quotes

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

Writing is a delicious agony.

I think good art happens on that edge between comfortable and in a lot of pain, you know what I mean?

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

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

Sometimes when I am writing, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words.

Writing is a refuge from unhappiness, but has its own sorrows.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.