Creative Agony Quotes

Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.

I'm very painful to deal with when I create a shoe.

All writers are vampires.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

When a book comes out I wonder if one person will buy it. It's agony. Of course it's stupid, but it's agony.

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.

To me, torture would be, "I can't think what to write in the next sentence. I'm stuck." Torture would be if you didn't have the next idea.

Musings The little poets sing of little things: Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings; Lovers who kissed and then were made as one, And modest flowers waving in the sun. The mighty poets write in blood and tears And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears. They reach their mad blind hands into the night, To plumb abysses dead to human sight; To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled, Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world. [click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

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

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

I know what it's like to have a bunch of material that's working that you don't care about. You want to die.

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

The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.

Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.

I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it's only once the play's out that the pain is gone.