Creative Suffering Quotes

Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.

All writers are vampires.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

When I wrote "Win," it only took about eight months, but eight months of sheer pain and suffering because every phrase that's in there - and there are about 130 specific linguistic recommendations - I had to test every one to make sure that it worked.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

It is not a torment to be an artist. It is a privilege.

As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.

If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture.

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

People who go into the arts are often hurt people. Many are manic-depressive. Some have tried suicide and some have succeeded. It's just part of the game. We are people who are oversensitive. That's why we're in this business, because of our need to communicate.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

I have an artistic temperament, which is a really tragic thing.

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

My childhood was extremely unhappy. That's not to say that my parents didn't love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn't come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.

Desperate? So what? I'm desperate, too!" Fenoglio snapped at her. "My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here," he said holding them out to her, "don't want to write anymore! I'm afraid of words Meggie! 'Once they were like honey, now they're poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn't love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I'm it's creator!

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.