Artistic Catharsis Quotes

I am what I am again: a writer. I have metabolized the injury into art.

I could be going through something in my life that I might not want to talk about in my music because my music is the way that I escape some of those things.

I'm a fairly tormented artist, and I'm less willing to indulge myself in self-pity, outside of songwriting.

When I got to write for the 'Battlefield' record, it was almost therapeutic. I had gone through a few things in the two years prior and it was really nice to take those thoughts and emotions and get them out. I definitely want to hone that side of my artistry.

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

I need to be able to write a poem after every film and to kind of cleanse myself from the character because for about three months or so, I'm constantly living through the character's eyes.

I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.

About one or two songs per record is me doing a little bloodletting.

The only thing that gets me through any type of pain, emotional or physical, is to make it worthwhile by putting it into my work.

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you’ve split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays.

He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

By the time I got writing 'Halcyon,' I was on a roll, and I realized I had so much to write about, I realized I had so much built up inside that I couldn't really alleviate before, and then all of a sudden it was like reservoir burst.

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

I live vicariously through my songs.

All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.

The more ugly, old, nasty, ill, and poor I become the more I want to get my own back by producing vibrant, well-arranged, radiant colour.

I was going through a lot of upheavals in my brain. The only way I could really get stuff out was to write songs.

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying not to think about.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

When I need to exorcise a demon, I grab whatever score is going to house the song I need to sing out of my system, and I sing it.