Irving Penn Quotes

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.

I can't live with art: I'd spend too much time tweaking it.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

I have an amazing wife and three beautiful children, and that certainly makes you less obsessive about your art as a musician - which I've always felt was more like painting than anything.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

I just need to do Pac's work. I just need to. Maybe because I'm a recovering addict, I'm obsessed like that.

Art is a beautiful world to get into. Once you are there, it is very difficult to get out of it. Like, once you start painting, you don't want to leave your brush and colours.

It's a very obsessive profession that you need to stay obsessed to get anywhere, and it's very easy for us to get obsessed and then nothing else matters. I was reading Somerset Maugham's novella, Moon and Sixpense, about this artist based on Gauguin's life. It was so beautifully written. You must be first rate because second rate you might not survive. If you're an accountant, you'll survive second rate. If you chance it big, you may not get anywhere.

I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture

What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

I never play the victim, I’d rather be a stalker.

Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength ... .

It's people who write music because they are obsessed that I like; because they have something to say and no other way to say it.

I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon. Part of the reason I work on stuff for so long is just because I love working on it. It's not that I'm haunted by some ghost sound. I just have nothing else to do with my life. Some people like to obsessively shop online. I like to obsessively rack up studio bills.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.

Growing up I was always prone to obsession, partly because of the way I am, but partly because after feeling so lonely for such a long time, when I found someone or something that I liked, I felt helplessly drawn to it. I suppose that accounts for some of the creepiness in my music.

If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do-only that I want that picture.

This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.

Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.

Drugs became an obsession, like Culture Club had been, like religion later became although I'm through with that now.

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.