Carl Jung Quotes

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

Every man hath a general desire of his own happiness; and likewise a variety of particular affections, passions, and appetites to particular external objects.

An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.

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 would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.

I crave ideas, and when an idea hits me, it grips me and it tortures me until I master it.

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

I write songs because I have to write them, and if I didn't I'd be doing some other kind of music that didn't require a song.

I'm like a junkie for writing.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.

I think I'm a pretty average person, and I respond to positive things, so I write for myself.

The ways in which mankind tends to invent technology is because we have this drive to create and to innovate, and we don't necessarily pump the brakes when we're doing it.

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.

Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

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

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.

It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against mans fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men.

Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.