Brian May Quotes

I tend to keep things that bother me clandestine... well-hidden. I'm also not very good at recognising the reasons that change my moods - they just seem to happen, which is not great for those around me.

Certainly, I devote my energy to both telling my personal life story and seeking self- obliteration. However, I will not destroy myself through art.

Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on a date.

I love how people in this business push themselves to know themselves, the world, and their creativity better.

I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.

To work on great material, what you really end up working on is yourself, your own humanity.

I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?

The biggest problem for me was feeling that as I became more balanced and a better man that I wouldn't have the fire to create from.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

I was all about my thoughts, my work, my inspiration. I was always in hair.

I want to be well enough to enjoy the things I've made.

I'm just a perpetually confused and terrified person that is trying to be less so all the time, and music is the byproduct of that.

Self improvement is masturbation.

Growing up sucks, doesn't it? I understand why people wouldn't want to get old - but it'd be one thing if we became a culture obsessed with eating right, doing yoga, going to therapy and becoming at one with ourselves. That be great. But we don't do that. We seem to be obsessed with all the wrong ways to stay young.

People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.

When you're an artist, there's always a moment in your life when you think you're not inspired and instead of doing things and instead of travel and instead of falling in love, you're just depressed, so you don't move, so you don't change. So you're not inspired.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

I am subject to very powerful lows. When you have highs, you have terrible lows. When you pinpoint that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, it is very frightening.

Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding.

Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.

I have learned so much about myself. I have re-discovered that little boy who had the hunger to create, which I think I had lost.

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

I realized that there was something internal that I could gain from pursuing this career as an actor. However, once I got into the business I just really abhorred what this career can drum up inside of a person.