Creative Death Quotes

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

Don't die with your music still inside.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

My fondest wish, I suppose, would be to die at the keyboard right after finishing a book, perhaps with a little time off to have some really good sex. It's not, 'Oh, thank God, this is book No. 250. I can die now.'

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

A day without writing was a little death.

Dead he is not, but departed, for the artist never dies.

With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

May you keep dreaming until the day you die. May imagination overtake memory. May you die young at a ripe old age.

I've always said that the artist dies twice. And the first death is the hardest which is the career death, the creative death. The physical death is an inevitability.

Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.

As soon as you think, 'Pirates are really popular right now with kids so I'm going to write a pirate movie'... that's when you're dead.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death does.

I think every actor would wish there is some challenge that is left. I would consider to be creatively dead if I were to say that I am satisfied now.

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.

Drummers are like sharks. They have to move all the time or they die.

Like every beginner, I have thought you could beat, pummel and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

Any man's death diminishes us, but when an artist passes away, we lose not just an island but an entire archipelago.

My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die.