Lynda Barry Quotes

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject.

Painting is a strange business.

I didn't intend. The word "intend" is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word "intend" is wrong. The word "pressure" is right. It's like any art form.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.

At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it's right.

Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.

Alas, the very name of picture produces a sadness of heart I cannot describe.

I don't understand beauty.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

Beauty is embarrassing for three reasons. When we see something beautiful it calls up raw, naked emotion and that's an embarrassing situation to be in. Number two... People that are born beautiful like supermodels act like entitled a**holes. It makes you embarrassed just to see 'em. They handle beauty embarrassingly. Number three... Artists are people who create beauty. That's the bottom line. It would be really embarrassing to introduce yourself as somebody who makes beauty. So that's just three of several reasons why I think beauty is embarrassing.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.

It's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life.