Michael Ondaatje Quotes

There are times when I've inhaled my work. There are artworks still inside of me.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

Great art can only be created out of love.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.

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.

I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.

Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.

Since many years, I realized that I have a darker side in me, even though I still believe I'm a very positive person. But still, there is still darkness that makes me write music and create in general, and it affects everything that I do. I believe it's a beautiful darkness.

I write music about what's going on in my head, what I'm angry about, and what I think is wrong/right.

For every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work.

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it's happening

It's pretty much rock-'n'-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.