Paolo Nutini Quotes

I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

Words, words, words, a million million words circle in my head like hawks, waiting to dive onto the page to rend and tear the only two words I want to write. Why me?

No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to... There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.

As creators, we feel constant demand for innovation from the world. This puts immense pressure on the creative process and oftentimes can have a dampening effect.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.

I think, like a lot of actors and people in the arts who are struggling to get where they want to be, you spend a lot of time sitting around grumbling about how you're not doing the kind of work you really want to do. But there's a lot of complacency in that, too.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.

It's a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

I'm a very creative person, but that side of me was suppressed because I was academic. I was depressed at school, and I didn't know why.

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.

I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.

I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

I just didn't want a musical side of me being prosperous but I'm dying on the inside.

The creative process is often wrapped up in bottomless anxiety, and when the world applauds the product of that process, it soothes the anxiety. Briefly. Then the anxiety returns and even intensifies.

The album 'Physicist,' I erased all the work that I had done halfway through. I think that's probably why that contributed to that album being sort of sub-par for me, just because by the time I had to go back and do it, I was just over it.

The good news, when you write with another, is that you never have an empty page in front of you. The bad news is... you never have an empty page in front of you.

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

Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.