Artistic Drought Quotes

I'm still shocked when people say, 'You haven't done a studio record in 20 years.' I try to make excuses for it, but the truth is I just wasn't with it.

Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.

Hollywood has turned into an emotional Detroit.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

I have not worked at all... Nothing seems worth putting down - I seem to have nothing to say - it appalls me but that is the way it is.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

The worst thing for a singer/songwriter is to run out of songs.

We as songwriters are in the same position as a professional fisherman. Our fishing grounds are kind of fished out.

When I'm not writing, I feel an awareness that something's missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There's something vital that's not happening.

For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

For the next three plus years, I really was not in creative shape. That part of my brain was not functioning.

It's weird, because I don't feel prolific. I don't write anything for months at a time.

One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.

I'd come to the point where I wasn't really putting out creatively. I didn't seem to have anything to say in that period of time after the '74 tour. There was nothing definite that I wanted to record.

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