Susan Cheever Quotes

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

I hardly ever write when I'm just feeling great.

I think everyone has been annoyed at school or in their life, that's a type of bullying. So, you can take those feelings and make them bigger. But I try not to use too much from my real life, because you'll be stuck with that all day.

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

When the bad stuff was really intense in my life, it was really what you would call writer's block. Your facility is just not as good because you feel so bad. I've heard of people right on the verge of suicide coming up with some of their best work. I wish I could think of an example, other than Van Gogh, perhaps!

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.

We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

I think good art does come from a dark place.

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

I only ever really take out my guitar when I'm miserable, which isn't necessarily a very good time to do it.

It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.

There's no such thing as writer's block. I'm brilliant all the time every day. It never stops.

I'm really happy when I'm actively creating things. When I'm frustrated and not excited, it's because I haven't written anything in a month or so.

Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.

And what I love about music and art in general is that you can take something so negative or positive - any emotion, no matter how sad or happy - and turn it into art.

'Supermodel' was a hard record for me; it was an emotional record to write. I was purging a lot of stuff with that album, and I think the one thing I didn't really consider, that I'd be supporting it for two years and living in that state of mind every night.

The words come. Usually, it's a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn't take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.

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.

To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.

If I don't stay creative and if I don't stay in the studio and keep writing and recording, I get kind of depressed. I can't quite remember what I'm supposed to be doing with myself.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

When I am not writing, I'm dying.