Sam Smith Quotes

Frustrated love has been the incentive for many great works.

You're successful if you can get one person to pick it up and put it on the turntable and go, Wow, thanks for writing that!

When you're heartbroken, you're at your most creative - you have to channel all your energies into something else to not think about it. Contentment is a creativity killer, but don't worry - I'm very capable of making myself discontented.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I guess you could write a good song if your heart hadn't been broken, but I don't know of anyone whose heart hasn't been broken.

I think suffering has always been an incentive for my creativity.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

The guitar is your first wings. It's assigned and designed to unfold your vision and imagination.

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.

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.

All I know is that the six months when I recorded this music was the most productive time of my life, and I'll always remember it as the first time in my life that I ever felt like I was one with my dreams.

Have you ever experienced a pain so sharp in your heart that it's all you can do to take a breath? It's a pain you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy; you wouldn't want to pass it on to anyone else for fear he or she might not be able to bear it. It's the pain of being betrayed by a person with whom you've fallen in love. It's not as serious as death, but it feels a whole lot like it, and as I've come to learn, pain is pain any way you slice it.

People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given.

You must have the devil in you to succeed in the arts.

The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that's about the time I started writing decent work.

Genius now and then produces a lucky trifle. We still read the Dove of Anacreon, and Sparrow of Catullus; and a writer naturally pleases himself with a performance which owes nothing to the subject.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife, / To help me through this long disease, my life.