Artistic Blockage Quotes

I am writing Parsifal only for my wife - if I had to depend on the German spirit, I should have nothing more to say.

All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

[After Easy Rider] I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again.

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

The creative process requires a period of boredom, of being stuck. That's actually a very uncomfortable period that a lot of people mistake for writer's block, but it's actually just part one of a long process.

Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

When I can't write, it depresses me.

I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. "Writer's block" sounds so dramatic and worrisome, and I don't worry about it. I know deep down that I'm a writer, and it's just a matter of time until it comes back, and when it does, it'll be good like it's always been.

If you feel like you're getting into a rut with a song, a night off usually fixes it.

'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

Prescription for writer’s block: fear of poverty.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.

It's tough for me to draw myself - usually way too self-critical.

I don't think I can ever write about young kids anymore. I completely shot my wad there.

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

In some ways, you can say that at any time in any writer's career: 'He might have run out of ideas.'