Artistic Suffering Quotes

I don't think that my music without pain is good music - and I wouldn't know, because I haven't made any music without pain.

I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward - I ask for no reward - only to live & to hear my work.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

I have an artistic temperament, which is a really tragic thing.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering.

All my friends are artists, so I am used to collective agony as a mode.

There are so few stories being produced that are human. I suffer with the loss of that. I feel kind of out of place, even though I've continued to work.

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Comics and actors come from such a wide variety of backgrounds and there's a theory that all comedians had tortured youths.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain

Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]