Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

I think, what happened with 'Dead Silence' is that other people told us that we should be doing that and now that I look back, I realize, 'should' is not a word that comes into an art. It's whatever you're feeling like doing.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Like any art, the creation of self is both natural and seemingly impossible. It requires training as well as magic.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.

Painting, for me, when it really 'happens,' is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon - as say, a lettuce leaf. By 'happens,' I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.

All true art must help the soul to realize its inner self.

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

Beethoven’s music always struck me. Always. He had this fire you know. I remember reading this story of him going deaf and pushing himself into self-isolation and that’s where he became himself. And to me that was, wow. Don’t let anything poison your individuality. Be away, break away and look in not outward.

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.

I have been struggling with mental illness and emptiness throughout my life. Now I want people to understand my glorious quest for the truth. Working on paintings is a process toward my artistic creation. It is a new spiritual theme of my whole philosophy for pursuing the truth. Each painting represents a process in all of my art.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality .

Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.