Creative Guilt Quotes

I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

I stay away from the studio too long, I feel like I'm abandoning myself.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.

The unpublished manuscript is like an uncon-fessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

I do write songs with a political dimension to them sometimes, but I'm always slightly appalled by it when I do.

I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.

Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I'm supposed to be doing.

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?

The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.