Elie Wiesel Quotes

In the past, I was definitely more apt to storing pain away and not worrying about it. But as I get older, it's really about figuring out how to process it, how to feel it, and then also how to use it in my art.

The only thing that gets me through any type of pain, emotional or physical, is to make it worthwhile by putting it into my work.

I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.

I think a lot of actors, comedians, musicians, artists are drawn to this world, because you're allowed to excavate whatever it is that you're struggling with, and hopefully turn it into art.

If I don't channel pain into a song, I play my guitar or play the piano or play my drums, or go swimming.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

In a way, art is a great way to release your love, fantasy, and desires. It's like a fetish. It's a comfortable way of excising a lot of your conscience.

Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

I am weary of personal worrying, in love with the art of madness.

What all of us artists are doing is using our pain as material to create our work.

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.

What I became a comedian for was to get my art out. To get some of these feelings and things I had on my chest out. I don't care if people believe them, listen to them, change their ways, or think, or any of that kind of crap. I'm interested in showing off. I'm the same kid from sixth grade who stood up and said "watch this."

It was his own grief turned magically to song.

A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.

Art is a way of survival.

I write books to relieve ­myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.

I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective. They are easier to write when I am impassioned and angry. It is a good way to channel that negative energy.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

So many people think that practicing an art is a good way to make a living. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. I'm talking about singing in the shower, I'm talking about dancing to the radio, I'm talking about writing a poem to a friend.

She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

I paint my joy and I sing my sorrow.

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.