Creative Catharsis Quotes

From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become 'The Hate U Give.'

Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.

Climate change is often the first thing I think about it in the morning, and the last thing I think about before I go to bed. It is not something that escapes that my mind, so inevitably, I had to kind of express that existential terror through art and music. My hope is to channel that confusion and energy into something good.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

Being vulnerable was difficult for me at first because I've said things in my songs about how I felt that I never told anybody.

I find it easier to write about stuff that is frustrating.

I think it's really cool to embrace the pain of something that may have hurt you and be able to express it through music.

I'd do a song in the studio and it would explain everything I'm going through so perfectly that when I went home and I felt down I could listen to that to make me feel better. It's a documentation of my life. I think it's just important to put it out there.

I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.

The form of the blues helps us express our joys, our fears, our - anything you want to express. And it helps you get it out instead of it spiraling inward, and you're getting twisted up and exploding. So it's a bit of salvation.

'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

I feel like all of my characters now take this congested situation, they clash, and from there you purge yourself.

I want people to feel the times where they don't feel good. You should dive into those emotions, because that's what I do with my music.

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.

You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

I write books to relieve ­myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.

I think anything that's creative really takes my mind off whatever it is that I'm going through in my life. If you're going through heartbreak, and you can write a song, it's a wonderful win-win, because it takes your mind off the heartbreak, and you get to vent.

The songs I was writing still had lyrics or sentiments that didn't match what I was feeling. It was old, negative energy coming out of me still, but it needed to all get out so I could trash those songs and put them in the bin. And then I was able to let the new songs out.

When I write sad songs, I feel like I'm sewing up a scar in me, and the outcome always feels so much better than when I write happy ones.

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

The only thing that gets me through any type of pain, emotional or physical, is to make it worthwhile by putting it into my work.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.