Creative Refuge Quotes

When art find no temple open, it takes refuge in the workshop.

Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)

When I am writing, my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

The album cover of 'Death of a Bachelor' is me on my roof of my backyard, so that's my place where I spend most of my time writing.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

I could always live in my art but never in my life

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

I don’t pay attention to the world. I just have the art I like and the music I like and for me that’s the whole world

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

I don't know what I would've done without it. I really struggled in school with reading and writing. Art was my refuge - my way of speaking, of dealing with my own issues and connecting with the world.

Becoming a musician was all about escape. It was about getting away from the foulness that was me.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

I wrote most of 'Hello in There' in a relay box, which looks like a mail box, only bigger. Sometimes, it was so cold and windy on my mail route that I'd go inside the relay box and eat a sandwich, just to get away from the wind. I remember working on 'Hello in There' inside the relay box.

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates

I decided if I couldn't be a writer, my life would be miserable. I had this imaginary room of references to all the books I had read, a kind of bubble, in which I lived.

For me, the arts has always been sort of my saving grace.

If it weren't for painting, I wouldn't live; I couldn't bear the extra strain of things.

Music was my joy, my home, the one place I felt happy and secure.

I'm from Boston, and I get easily overwhelmed in New York, so I go to Boston and stay with my parents for a few months at a time to write, or edit, or just to cry.