Madonna Ciccone Quotes

Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art.

It dawned on me that art was the way I could survive.

I'm pretty terrible at writing, so the way I kind of therapeutically get through things is by drawing.

I think anything that's creative really takes my mind off whatever it is that I'm going through in my life. If you're going through heartbreak, and you can write a song, it's a wonderful win-win, because it takes your mind off the heartbreak, and you get to vent.

When life gave me tough situations, acting helped me cope with those situations.

Arts can save children, no matter what's going on in their homes.

Creativity, for a lot of young people, is a coping mechanism. It's the only place they feel comfortable. It's the only time they feel like they're being heard or can make a difference, is if they can go into a room and do a drawing or go to a garage and play a song or retreat to this world.

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.

Since I cannot sing, I paint.

Art saved my life in two ways. It made me feel special, because I could do things my friends couldn't, but it also gave me a way to demonstrate to my teacher that, despite the fact that I couldn't write a paper or do math, I was paying attention.

With me being in so many pain from when you have a betrayal from your best friend - who was my husband - and the girl got pregnant, I couldn't even get out of bed. The only thing that saved me was my stand-up. I would get on stage and just talk about stuff, and I made people laugh. A lot of women e-mail me and say, 'How do you smile? How do you laugh at something like this?' That's how I do it. I laugh because that's how I get through pain.

I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.

If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying not to think about.

I'd rather be home alone, painting.

The only thing that gets me through any type of pain, emotional or physical, is to make it worthwhile by putting it into my work.

It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.

Art gives me an outlet where I can be aggressive in a world where I usually can't be.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

I am weary of personal worrying, in love with the art of madness.

I decided I needed something that I could feel as passionate about as acting, and something in which I could completely lose myself. I started painting, and I'm still doing it.

I never wanted to be a professional artist; I think that's limiting.

It's easy to actually get the ink on the page, but somehow I've gotta find a way to play this. And I have to find a way to emotionally survive playing this.

Art is a way of survival.

If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.