Harriet Martineau Quotes

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

I have always tried to work according to what affects me, to a script that I like because it touches me in some way, without deliberately pursuing a commercial career or a particular image.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

I didn't start drag because I thought it would be a ticket to anything. I did it for my own narcissistic fulfilment. When I started selling records, going on tour, doing TV... I never expected any of it.

I've never not been pleased with one of my albums. I figure because it's spoken word, there will be people who relate to it, and people who don't, so I don't worry about any of that. I've been doing it for over twenty years. I've always written because it was something I had to do, never for the glory.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

To me, writing is not a profession. You might as well call living a profession. Or having children. Anything you can't help doing.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.

Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

Artists, like yourself, are born with a need to express that's just innate.

I don't necessarily do anything just for the money. I do it for the passion and I do it for the love, because I'm still hungry. So if I want to do music, it's not necessarily motivated because of monetary value. It's more about the passion and the love, and I think that's where music should come from, the heart, not necessarily just to cash a check.

When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

Writing is its own reward.

I do not know if you bridle your pen, but when my pencil moves, it is necesary to let it go, or - crash!... nothing more.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. Yourself.