Creative Jealousy Quotes

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

Sometimes I see movies and I get almost angry - because I'm like, I can never make that movie. It stems from a jealousy, but from a good kind of jealousy. It's inspirational.

The never-ending competition between writers hasn't changed between 1868 and 2000. I used to belong to writers' workshops with other professionals, but that becomes impossible after a while. Everyone's on a different step of the career ladder. Jealousy doesn't have to erupt into murder and burying someone in Wells Cathedral, but it is always there.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.

Actors want to be musicians, and musicians want to be baseball players.

The artist envies what the arties gains, The bard the rival bard's successful strains.

I think people face that in any artistic field, this idea of: oh, I could do that, if I had the time.

Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone's work, I think to myself, 'Gee, I wish I had done that.'

I wasn't even in a newspaper office where I was getting assignments in competition with other people. I remember earlier, though, that I knew a young woman who had been published in the New Yorker, and I was so jealous of her. It wasn't exactly a personal competition. I just envied that accomplishment.

All artists are socialists until they see another artist with a bigger house than theirs.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

I was always jealous of my violinist friends and cellist friends who traveled with their instruments.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

I am a passionate, committed composer, and the guy I used to write musicals with, once he was able to ditch me and get a better composer, actually won the Tony.

I try not to see new comics - their acts or their films. Part of that is professional. I don't want to be influenced. But another part is fear and jealousy. I'm afraid to see how good they might be. I don't like that emotion, but it's part of me.

It is impossible for authors to discover beauties in one another's works; they have eyes only for spots and blemishes.

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.