Phil Ochs Quotes

I think a lot of songwriters would agree that it's often easier to find inspiration in misery.

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 don't think that my music without pain is good music - and I wouldn't know, because I haven't made any music without pain.

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

Do I suffer for my art? Well, I get a lot of flatulence when I'm nervous.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

I think... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.'

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

It hurts to look at the clouds, but it also helps, like most things that cause pain. So I need to run, and as my lungs burn and my back rebels with that stabbing knife feeling and my legs muscles harden and the half inch of loose skin around my waist jiggles, I feel as though my penance for the day is being done and that maybe God will be pleased enough to lend me some help, which I think is why He has been showing me interesting clouds for the past week.

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

The secret of poetry is cruelty.

The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.

There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.

He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Hours later the blank sheet still stared at me, and I beat my fist against the desk in fury and fustration, striking it so hard my hand bled. That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.

What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.