Katherine Mansfield Quotes

I think loneliness comes with being creative, because you are obsessed with creation. And it is so satisfying that sometimes, I have noticed, I completely neglect my friends and my family, and they fall away.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.

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

The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.

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

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

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.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in.

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

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

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

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

I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.