Lord Byron Quotes

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

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.

Art is born of humiliation.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

I don't think that my music without pain is good music - and I wouldn't know, because I haven't made any music without pain.

I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

We know that creative people have all sorts of demons.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

A lot of me is very up, and you have to have light and shade. They are both important and you have to be able to balance them. You have to admit that sadness is part of you and that it enriches you. I use it in my work.

You need to suffer to be interesting.

I'm attracted to artists like Frida Kahlo, because her work was her life, her questions, her outrage, her suffering, her pain. Everything is in her work.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

An artist needs to live to create, and to live means to suffer.

Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.

When you're in front of the camera, you have to try to create different emotions because even the person making pictures of you needs inspiration. To be 'you' means nothing - you can be so many yous.

I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.