Artistic Urge Quotes

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

Many have an irresistible itch for writing.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.

When I had spent a few days without thinking, without doing anything, I would feel a sudden urge to paint. Then I would set up my easel in full sunshine.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

The impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

I think an artist who has it in their heart to do or say something, they'll say it. It's not something that's mandatory, but it will come out.

You don't decide to paint. It's like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It's a need, not a choice.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

Plays are the marathon of scriptwriting. You fix on a point somewhere in the middle distance, and you start running, and you don't stop until you get to the end. The theory is that you have something you cannot not say: this is the engine that propels you through to the last page.

I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself.

According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness. Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.

When a real artist creates something, it has to be a necessity, the only way he can say something.