Irving Stone Quotes

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

I could never even entertain the notion that it's an option, to not be an artist.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

I never thought about doing anything other than making art.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

I think that most of us [writers] would rather have an audience than countless riches. If we wanted to be rich, we'd be doing smething else.

At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.

Art for me is like breathing. When I stop breathing, what happens?

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

I fell into this business by accident. It wasn't something I ever aspired to be: an actress. It just happened. It has evolved into an insane passion... a creative outlet. But nothing more. It's my hobby... one of the ways I express myself as an artist. And the day it becomes a job... a career... I will quit...

My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It's a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.