Eric Fischl Quotes

All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.

It is painful to relive things that have caused emotional crises or whatever and find ways to express that musically.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.

I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain so to speak and kind of being able to vent it through my music.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art.

My songs are basically my diaries. Some of my best songwriting has come out of time when I've been going through a personal nightmare.

I don't have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapist is in my paint brushes.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

For me, music is therapeutic, so the songs that came to me the easiest came from the most devastating moments of my life.

I wrote 'Road Less Traveled' to make myself feel better and process what I was going through.

I think part of my job as a songwriter is to go back in my memory and pull up those pains for other people because somebody else is going to come along who didn't have a good issue with their father.

Music has been there for me. Whether good or bad, it's the way that I process experience. As a listener and as a writer.

Making music has always made me happy. When I go through a situation, the best way for me to get over it is to bundle up all of my emotions about it, put it in a little shell, create something, and then let it go.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

I think a lot of actors, comedians, musicians, artists are drawn to this world, because you're allowed to excavate whatever it is that you're struggling with, and hopefully turn it into art.

I grew up in a sad, depressed place. I got out. Poetry saved my life.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.