Stevie Smith Quotes

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

Sometimes I hate writing songs. Because it hurts sometimes. I'm very emotional.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

Art is born of humiliation.

I think good art does come from a dark place.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

When you're heartbroken, you're at your most creative - you have to channel all your energies into something else to not think about it. Contentment is a creativity killer, but don't worry - I'm very capable of making myself discontented.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

I'm always better when I'm not doing well, that's when I write good songs.

It takes a lot of emotional high and struggles to write songs.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.