Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

You need to suffer to be interesting.

That's something that I think the best artists retain - the ability to invite you into their small, intimate inner space, and let that be what radiates.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.

It's hard to be an artist. It's hard to be anything. It's hard to be.

My creative life is a constant struggle to achieve a balance between letting things flow in and letting things flow out.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

Yeah, at home it's all moonbeams and puppy-dog tails, so I guess I do have a darker side - and I like writing about it.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

An artist needs to live to create, and to live means to suffer.

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 wrote 'Channel Orange' in two weeks. The end product wasn't always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

I think a lot of actors feel like outsiders or miscreants. This profession provides an opportunity to play out all the different parts of ourselves.