Beth Gibbons Quotes

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

Art is a kind of illness.

I think art doesn't have to be created in a period of misery, but it certainly helps.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.

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

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

Something really is wrong with me. And I don't know what it is.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

The 12 years I was in Fleetwood Mac before were not particularly happy years. I was not in a very good place, psychologically, when I left. I didn't have a lot of confidence in what I was doing.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

Fear has governed my life, if I think about it.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

Trying to force creativity is never good.

That is the real problem of depression - a condition which will affect an estimated one in five of the population at some point in their lives. It is completely unimaginable until you have been through it.