Kevin Gates Quotes

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

I was like, 'Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.'

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

I have a hard time sometimes watching my own work.

I know a lot of artists and chefs don't talk about this, but sometimes you just don't get to the finish line. That honesty and tenderness is something we're kind of not supposed to express.

I don't know if I've got the capacity for all of the creativity that I want to put out there, which is annoying and frustrating - it's kinda like torture.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

One of my big fears is drying up, and the more I create, the more I feel myself shrinking beneath the backlog of work I've done.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, 'Do this, do that,' but it's my demon who provokes me.

Any artist always has misgivings about calling himself an artist.

It's a phobia I have. I never assume I'm going to be able to write another album after I finish one.

The essential truth is that sometimes you're worried that they'll find out it's a fluke, that you don't really have it. You've lost the muse or - the worst dread - you never had it at all. I went through all that madness early on.

It's not a lack of confidence, because I can't argue with the fact that I've taken some good pictures. But it's just a raw fear that you've taken the last one.

As a typical creative, I am all ego and insecurity!

I am an artist through to my marrow, which might be a curse and not necessarily a good thing.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.

Blank paper always symbolizes the anxiety of the painter.

Words, words, words, a million million words circle in my head like hawks, waiting to dive onto the page to rend and tear the only two words I want to write. Why me?

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.