Robert Fritz Quotes

It's still difficult for me to watch my work.

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.

Do you have to have emotional turmoil to create music? I'm not sure because I've never been without it

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.

You start to compete with yourself when your catalog gets bigger and bigger... I mean, everybody wants the next 'Bless the Broken Road,' but you don't write those every day, so it's difficult.

Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.

If you stick in the business of being creative, you get hurt. And creative disappointment seems so much harder to take than any other kind. But if you're not prepared to get hurt like that, life can be pretty boring. I think I'm going to keep on going.

Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in the darkest of dark corners. Trace the scars back to your own fingers and remember them.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

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

Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.

Enthusiasm Rules his inner world. Determination Rules his outer world. Therefore Happiness has become His real name.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

I work from almost a dangerous place in my mind sometimes.

The more neurosis the more wisdom.

No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of the as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is mere vanity and vexation of spirit.

Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.

I feel I must live alone, alone, alone - with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.

Emotional pain makes me want to isolate. Or hit back. It's very tough to rise above my natural inclinations. I'm always working on this.

I'm pretty cerebral, so I can occasionally rationalize emotional pain away, but when I can't, that's when I start to feel the fire inside take over and somehow manage to power through.

How can you write if you can't cry?

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

Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh-- To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye. Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What?

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

When Nehemiah's heart was broken he paid attention to his broken heart.