Honore de Balzac Quotes

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I think a lot of songwriters would agree that it's often easier to find inspiration in misery.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.

I'm never happier than when I'm being creative, whether that's with Coldplay or other artists. I just love being in the studio.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be mekancholy.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

People say you make your best work when in despair, but I think happiness is a good place to write from.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.