Lisa Hanawalt Quotes

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

Art should not be an easy thing.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

For me personally, and I'm sure not everyone is like this. But for me I find it difficult to choreograph in the daytime.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

I don't really have any advice, other than to say it's the most appallingly difficult thing I've ever tried to do and I wish I had a better idea of how to do it. In my experience what you end up with is the by-product of your failure to achieve what you set out to do. It may turn out OK, but it wasn't what you meant and you've no idea how you got there.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

Creating anything is hard.

As creators, we feel constant demand for innovation from the world. This puts immense pressure on the creative process and oftentimes can have a dampening effect.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

For me, it's painful to make a movie. It's not my normal rhythm.

I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.

But life is tough and if you're creative, it's tougher.

I'm envious of writers and musicians. I think it must be so difficult. Not just the frustration, but the discipline.