Diane Wakoski Quotes

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

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

Art is a liaison between some sort of deranged mentality and others who are not going through it.

I think therapy interferes with the creative process. It takes off the edge.

I don't stay in accent or anything, but internally, I get quite dark and destroy myself a little bit. But that's what I do, and I enjoy it. It's how I do my work.

It was my Fat Elvis period. I was eating and drinking like a pig. I was depressed and I was crying out for help. It's real. And I meant it.

I try not to take on the weight or the burden of it. Once it's on the paper, I try to leave it, because I want to surrender to what I'm supposed to write about.

Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

This violent rage that turned inward cannot be helped by drink.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

All the Hennessy and weed can't hide, the pain i feel inside, its like I'm living just to die.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.

Depression is the flip side of creative inspiration but it can be useful. It's telling you to stop for a little bit. You can become so fully absorbed in the world of creative work that it can lead to some imbalance in your life.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

My life sucks when I’m only half-aware of it. If I quit drinking and saw what it’s really like, I’d probably jump off a bridge.

What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.

The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

I went into my own black-out period which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they'd get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn't emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had.