Francis Bacon Quotes

I think good art does come from a dark place.

An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

Do you have to have emotional turmoil to create music? I'm not sure because I've never been without it

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.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

The only question that nobody ever asks is: What breaks your heart? I think that should be asked of all "artists."... So, what breaks your heart?

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

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

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

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.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

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

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

I went into my own black-out period which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they'd get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn't emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had.

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

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.