Artistic Death Quotes

There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain!

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.

When an artist becomes complacent, he dies.

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.

In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.

The day an actor is not required, the day no one is writing for you, is when you're actually dead… That's a very scary moment.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered.

I dread to be compared to all these directors who have a lot of spontaneous emoting and swearing in their films - that is death; it's a cul-de-sac. It doesn't lift the material at all. It's just a cliched reproduction of what we think is normal behaviour.

I don't like to sit and bask in my own awards. Awards represent artistic death to me.

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Instead of thinking that's a nice tune, you start thinking is it the right pace, is it the right tempo? That is the death nell for artists.

However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.