Hector Berlioz Quotes

I think people who are artists, actors, singers, great songwriters, they tend to have a hyper state of emotion where they feel things very, very deeply, probably more deeply than the average person walking down the street where it may affect them, but not to the same extent.

It takes a level of creative depression to hear 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' and weep.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.

A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.

There was a sadness over me, a melancholy. That's always been a part of me - those are some of the things that lead you to the arts.

I like the contrast in making something that sounds sunny but also has an element of melancholy to it.

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

That's part of being an artist; you have to be that sensitive.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

People who go into the arts are often hurt people. Many are manic-depressive. Some have tried suicide and some have succeeded. It's just part of the game. We are people who are oversensitive. That's why we're in this business, because of our need to communicate.

Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.

I write emotional algebra.

An artist doesn't necessarily have deeper feelings than other people, but he can express these feelings. He is like everyone else-only more so! He speaks with a Formal Sigh.

We wouldn't be artists, writers, painters, musicians, if we weren't sensitive.

A woman who writes feels too much.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

One never paints violently enough.

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

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality--same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

If I wasn't an actor, I think I'd have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights.