Harold Brodkey Quotes

I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.

In terms of the feeling of the piece, I cant think about what people are gonna think about it, what are the critics gonna say, I'm trying to bring some resolution, and realize that myself. It's a struggle; it's a process that gets us this.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

I never told anybody I wanted to write, I kind of fell into it backwards.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

A lot of times I have the song inside of me and I have to fight to get it out. I'm a very visual person, so I can see the song but I can't hear it. But I think that if your music becomes a war for it to happen, in the end there's a certain kind of aggression in the music. And I think that's a lot more interesting.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

It's a really big struggle for me to write a song. Songs take either 30 seconds for me to write or a year or two to piece together, depending on the song and how I'm feeling on any given day. I don't really like to write music at all unless I am completely unbothered by touring.

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.