David Nicholls Quotes

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

When I get an artistic itch, I have to scratch it.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

The impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

My compulsion is to create things.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

My capacity for wanting to create has never faltered. If anything, it's gained momentum.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

I'm an artist in my heart.

When you receive a script and it leaps out at you and it's breathing with its own heartbeat - I suppose when you read something like that it's not a choice of whether you do it or don't. It feels like it chooses you, so you just do it.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

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

I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn't I would never write anything else.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.

No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.