Kris Kristofferson Quotes

Emotionally, it was the hardest 33 days of my life, but it was worth it because the result is that this album is 100 percent me. It’s heartfelt, real, bold, honest, vulnerable, hopeful, strong, poetic, bluesy, gritty, pretty, and simple.

With every project you do, you bring out a part of yourself, and it seems to be quite a good way of expanding a person.

I think, for me as an artist, there are no boundaries. As long as I'm creating in a way that isn't trying to re-traumatize any wounds that I do have.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

I made some good pictures, and I made some bad ones. I wasn't trying to build an image, though; I was trying to build a life for myself.

Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction - they're always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

I'm a bit of a strange human being - I love to work. I love art. I love self-expression.

When I was younger, I was trying to create from attitude more than anything else.

The creative process has been a little bit of an experience, really - to try and make that work for me. The only way I know how to do that is just to remain genuine, humble, and true to everything I know already in my life.

The real essence of art turned out to be not something high up and far off - it was right inside my ordinary daily self - If a musician wants to become a finer artist, he must first become a finer person.

...start thinking of yourself as an artist and your life as a work-in-progress. Works-in-progress are never perfect. But changes can be made...Art evolves. So does life. Art is never stagnant. Neither is life. The beautiful, authentic life you are creating for yourself is your art. It's the highest art.

The artist is very lucky, because in an art form that's spontaneous like jazz, that's when you really see your true self. And that's why, when I put down my instrument, that's when the challenge starts, because to learn how to be that kind of human being at that level that you are when you're playing - that's the key, that's the hard part.

Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I'd realized what a hell I'd made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I made the decision to quit show business. Give up the skintight dresses and manicured smiles. The false concern over sentimental lyrics. I would never again work to make people smile inanely and would take on the responsibility of making them think.

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

Sometimes the characters that I'm most resistant to are the ones that I find the most satisfying to play, because you have to dig deeper and you have to find different parts of yourself that are not necessarily the first thing you access and that's fun and interesting.