Lola Kirke Quotes

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

When a real artist creates something, it has to be a necessity, the only way he can say something.

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.

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.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

I don't write songs, play music and tour, really, for anyone else but myself. It's something that I have to do to stay alive.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

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

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

What is it that turns people into artists? It often comes from some kind of pain or angst, a need to understand or express something. It very rarely comes from confidence, being raised by parents who want to hear what you have to say and wants to encourage you.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

I don't think you make a choice to be an artist. There was no decision for me. I've been expressing myself this way since I can remember.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.