Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.
The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.
I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.
I become mad when I work. It's like a fever that grows; I don't need to choose just one thing.
When I make a good beat, I'm possessed. I'm not on earth!
But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
Gauguin flew into a frenzy! He held my head under the X-ray machine for ten straight minutes and for several hours after I could not blink my eyes in unison." — "If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists
A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it.
The mania is like wasps under the skin, like my head's going to explode with ideas.
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, From earth to heaven.
It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.
Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
I've been known to write 10 pages a day for 10 days running before I take a breath. I am not a disciplined writer. I'm one of those people who laughingly call themselves inspirational writers, which basically means someone who has no control over their own creative process.
for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.
Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.
A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.
The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.
