Artistic Fear Quotes

Maybe there's a different story when it comes to hip-hop or different genres, but as far as rock music goes, I think there is a sort of fear of saying things people might be apt to criticize. Our band is the opposite of that.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

Once I actually get in the studio and I start working, I'm fine, but it's just getting there and these hours of torment with myself and self doubt, thinking 'I'm useless' and 'Who am I, conning myself into thinking I can do it again.'

I didn't want to record 'I Think We're Alone Now,' because I thought it wouldn't show that I could actually sing.

I think it's your own ghost, seeing the work and just thinking if it will be okay to leave that around.

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.

The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.

I confess, right at the start, to the doubts - and sometimes outright dreads - that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today?

I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.

I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!

I'm kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.

I think that things like Twitter and the blogosphere are so instantaneously critical that I think it's actually created a bit of a culture of artistic fear to branch out too much because you don't want to be slammed.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

Obviously I try to make the best music that I can, but after about two years of making an album, you start to worry: 'Is it going to come out all right? Is it all going to sound churned out?'

I'm still so young, so I feel like people have wanted to keep me in a 'no-makeup' fresh type of look - sometimes artists are a little afraid of really putting the makeup on me.

I hope to write someday and that’s even more terrifying than performing. You don’t just entertain the audience, you give them little bits of your soul.

All artists have insecurity.

I still believe that at any time the no-talent police will come and arrest me.

I once saw an elaborate landscape in a gallery, drawn in pencil, that took my breath away. Then I realized the artist probably didn't have enough confidence to use a pen.

'YOU AREN'T TALENTED' - it cuts right to the fear of every artist.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

I do everything I watch, whether it's like a big comic book film that I've done or something very serious and raw.I do have that initial feeling like I'm the worst, this is awful, my work is - I've let everybody down. I definitely have that.

The thing with 'Lost Without You' is that for a long time I didn't feel like I could share it with people. When it came to releasing it, it was a cliff-diving moment.

One of my big fears is drying up, and the more I create, the more I feel myself shrinking beneath the backlog of work I've done.