artistic compulsion Quotes

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

Becoming a writer wasn't a choice (there would have been far more worthwhile things to do); it was the best, most fruitful way of being a bit ill.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

I wrote from the time I was four. It was my way of screaming and yelling, the primal scream. I wrote like a junkie, I had to have my daily fix.

Being a musician is a given for me-I didn't have much choice in the matter.

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

I'm just here to do the best that I can do with the music that I make, and I'm not making it for any other reason than I feel like I have to. These ideas have to be created because they're in me, and if I leave them in my head, I'll go crazy.

It's kind of like I'm Phil Spector, and I'm forcing a young girl to make pop music and perform exhaustively. Except, instead of it being someone else, that girl is also me.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

I have to go on writing because I wouldn't be able to go on without writing. It is the only function that works for me, and without that function, I would die.

The thing about me is, coming from an alternative music background and singing for nine years, being basically invisible, I'm so used to writing for myself - and at the end of the day, I do it because I feel like I have to. So when I'm recording or writing, I don't have other people in mind.

This game wears on you. It tears you down. It's perpetual motion for some people who've achieved a level of independence, like Madonna and Jay-Z - they don't need to do music anymore. But there's people who need it. And in that need, that's when it's tough and it tears you to pieces.

I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

Motivation is just this potion to create stuff, a compulsion to express the truth of my own experiences in this life.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

I'm writing all the time, really. It's become a little bit of a problem when I go home. Sometimes I should really go out and hang out with my friends, but what happens is I get really inspired and then just go and mess around on the computer.

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

I do it for myself and for like-minded people. Half the time I don't know why I make what I do. I'd do this if no one was listening. I'm stuck. I've got the curse.

Yes, writing is not easy. But can any writer imagine NOT writing?

A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.

Art is like breathing for me. If I don't do it, I start to choke.