Sayed Kashua Quotes

You need to suffer to be interesting.

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.

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

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

I have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head - the characters talking all at once - and I have to write to make them stop.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

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.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

Art is born of humiliation.

I think a lot of songwriters would agree that it's often easier to find inspiration in misery.

I think good art does come from a dark place.

There's always a part of my brain saying: 'Stop getting comfortable. Don't relax.' Because I find it difficult to write when I'm happy. I have to go out there and get battered up and bruised to write anything. I have to feel something.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I think suffering has always been an incentive for my creativity.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I want to do a musical. I want to write a book. I have all these ideas and I can't get away from them.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

Art never comes from happiness.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

You can't be creative when you're completely happy.