Giorgio de Chirico Quotes

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.

You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

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.

I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

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.

The thing running through me is the same thing that writes songs. It's the fighter about to get into the ring. It's like, I'm not here to entertain you; I'm here to get this out, whatever it is.

I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs.

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

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

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

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

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

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

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.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

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.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.