Greta Gerwig Quotes

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

My advice is: if you've got to be miserable to write great music, then drive a truck.

I think art doesn't have to be created in a period of misery, but it certainly helps.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

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

All the great artists had their dark sides. Look at Amy Winehouse or anyone who has achieved a certain level of success. Even Adele, and the people that you wouldn't put in the same category as a gangster rapper. These women have exposed their vulnerabilities, demons, and things that have hurt them.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.

Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories.

Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to put her fist through a mirror. She would tell everyone it was so that she could see what was on the other side, but really, it was so that she wouldn't have to look at herself. That, and because she thought she might be able to steal a piece of glass when no one was looking, and use it to carve her heart out of her chest.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

All the Hennessy and weed can't hide, the pain i feel inside, its like I'm living just to die.

What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

Sickle cell anemia made me a real angry kid. I was angry at God. I used to sit there and pray to God, please, take this pain away. It was nothing magical happening, there was nothing there. I felt like my prayers were not being answered. It made me real moody, I had an attitude problem growing up as a young child.

I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.