Creative Impasse Quotes

I don't know if I've got the capacity for all of the creativity that I want to put out there, which is annoying and frustrating - it's kinda like torture.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

Writer's block is for people who have the luxury of time.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

I've learned there is a void in adult stories across the land. Hollywood, whatever that is anymore, is losing their ability to tell those stories because they're not even thinking of that audience.

Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

The computer industry is creatively bankrupt.

No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to... There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.

The end of the Nineties was an unhappy Primus camp. I hit a creative stagnation that wasn't helping us forward, and the personal elements, it just was time to stop.

I know people who have suffered writer's block, and I don't think I've ever had it. A friend of mine, for three years he couldn't write. And he said that he thought of stories and he knew the stories, could see the stories completely, but he could never find the door. Somehow that first sentence was never there. And without the door, he couldn't do the story. I've never experienced that. But it's a chilling thought.

I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.

Sometimes I draw blanks.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

If I've got Writer's Block it generally means that I don't have that much to say or something's not quite connecting. I have had Writer's Block a bunch of times and it's generally because I'm not able to write down what I'm feeling basically. Mostly, I just need to be alone really, or be with someone who can bring that out of me.

I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.

Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

I wonder if some artists determine their entire identity through that which they create. How dangerous! Imagine if they were to stop creating!

I relate to the feeling that Da Vinci was often plagued by the idea that what he did wasn't good enough, that he was his harshest critic. He'd sometimes destroy what he was working on.

New York was breaking my concentration and disintegrating my thoughts.