Imogen Cunningham Quotes

Every time I am directing, I question why in God's name I'm doing it again. It's like hitting yourself in the forehead with a hammer.

From the outside, being an artist seems like a dream life, but there are much darker aspects to it.

It's a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

I am an artist, and I understand the pros and cons of being an artist, and the pressures of being an artist, and how much being an artist can be torture to people around you; you know, you friends and your family and how material you can be, and how it's hard to take criticism and all the things like that.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

We know that creative people have all sorts of demons.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of the as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is mere vanity and vexation of spirit.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase: 'I knew, I never got it said.

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

When I performed the songs in front of an audience at the end of each project and I knew the storytellers were in the crowd listening, that was hard.

I feel sorry for players who are always lying awake at night, brooding over their games.