Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.

I still haven't made a film that defines who I am.

The most important thing for me as an artist is having an identity.

I just worked my own personal thoughts into my music, and just kept at it until I found a way in.

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught - not like what I had seen - shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

I've spent my whole life trying to find out who I am, so I could express that through the music.

I just write the stuff I want to at the time, what feels right for me.

I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture.

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

If I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.

For all creative people, that's sort of everyone's journey. You feel something inside, and it takes a while to figure out what that looks like and what your voice is.

I've been writing all my life, and playing bass came later on, when I was about 26. What I recognized with poetry and music that I had a different voice - there were things I wanted to express that I could not as an actor or even as a director. It was another avenue of expression that my soul needs.

I have always written from a personal place.

I always tell young film-makers, 'Find the song that only you can sing.' It doesn't just come to you. It's trial and error and disappointment before you find, slowly but surely, the confidence to express your film-making identity.

I don't really think of myself so much as a writer as a stylist, someone who came into writing from the back door and has found it through a certain very specific and personal means.

I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?

I think that anyone who is in any way creative or is creating something, whether an architect or fashion designer, I think if you have the opportunity to create something that is fully you, it frees your mind and your spirit and gives you the opportunity to really find yourself.

Everything that I've ever made in my life is from my instinct.

I had a passion and a soul in me that was screaming to be heard, and I had to let them out in as honest and challenging a way as I could.

I like to paint and spend a lot of time doing art. For me, it's about hearing yourself and putting it out there as art. It's like a therapy thing.

The hardest part of being an artist is discovering what it is you do differently.

I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.

I know someone might look at a creative person's job and think it's pretty fun. It is. It's the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely challenging to carve out your own completely unique path and not following a default path that someone else has already paved.

Poetry was my 'in' to the idea that I could express myself through art.