Creative Mortality Quotes

People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it's as if books did die out.

I think I'm a good joke writer. I'm also very scared that the last joke I wrote is the last joke I'll ever write.

There is no greater consolation for mediocrity than that the genius is not immortal.

Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy.

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.

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.

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

I'd always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there's a sense that you're never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.

I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

I can paint until I'm forty. After that I intend to dry up.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

It is a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructible in our wake and, at the same time, are drawn to all the things that kill: whiskey and cigarettes, unprotected sex, and deep-fried burritos.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.