Aldous Huxley Quotes

I think good art happens on that edge between comfortable and in a lot of pain, you know what I mean?

People who go into the arts are often hurt people. Many are manic-depressive. Some have tried suicide and some have succeeded. It's just part of the game. We are people who are oversensitive. That's why we're in this business, because of our need to communicate.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

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

I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

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.

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

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.

Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

I was given the gifts of the artist, and the trouble that goes with them: So I have that blessing, and there was never a time thatI questioned it or doubted it.... For forty years, I wanted to jump out of windows.

Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

I do not think good art comes from comfort. While from a humanistic standpoint I would have much rather been at my home that I own, surrounded by friends and family and controlling my environment completely.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

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

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