No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]
City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.
Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.
The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.
I think the problem with growing up and idealizing self-destructive artists is that you only see the beauty they created rather than all the pain that went along with it.
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.
Because artists can be extremely eccentric and insane, and unfortunately, the people they hurt the most are the people that are closest to them.
