Mohsin Hamid Quotes

If you're an artist, you have to use everything to your advantage, even the pain.

Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.

It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.

Generalised anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work - though it's not necessarily evident in anything that's finished.

Whenever I'm obsessed about anything, that becomes the subject of a song.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

I wrote my songs despite the fact that I was a drunk, not because of it.

It used to kind of upset me when I'd be working on a part in my hotel room, and I'd get an idea for a song and find myself on the guitar for an hour when I should be working on my lines. But I've discovered that when I start to shake up my creativity it wants to be expressed in all kinds of different ways. They all kind of inform each other.

It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

Anything that propels me to create, like [my book, Straight Walk]. It kept me inspired for almost four years.

There are moments when you feel trapped, ill at ease. A year later the same feeling can turn out to be the theme of a book.

In 1975,Bob Dylan was almost 10 years past his prime - and then he released the best album of his career, Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded amid a painful divorce, Blood on the Tracks is proof that heartbreak makes great art - just as many of the albums that followed were the opposite.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it....for me, every act of the art of solving a mystery.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting.