Creativity Crisis Quotes

Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know.

My great fear is not that I'll run out of ideas. It's that I'll run out of time.

I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up.

Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do, to see what's there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people's impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

I found my voice when I started doing YouTube videos, and that's when I was pretty old, to be honest. I think it's about exploration. I think it's about trying new things, meeting new people, and also, it's about borrowing inspiration from other people. Because I still have those moments where I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm a loser, what am I doing?"

I feel at times that I'm making up these little people and I've lost my mind.

I've always defined myself as a writer, I've never decided what it was I was gonna write. [...] I always fancied myself one, but I'm not. I'm so far from a writer.

I'm bored way too easily. I'm staring at screens half the day. I need to be overstimulated. And how will that express itself artistically?

I don't believe in writer's block.

Well, I think Hollywood, to be quite honest, I think they've run out of material.

We as songwriters are in the same position as a professional fisherman. Our fishing grounds are kind of fished out.

At 35, I'm thinking, Oh, I don't have any of that initial inspiration that I had before, all that angst. I always thought I would burn out very quickly.

I question every word; I write 'the' and immediately feel scorn. It's such an ordinary word - everybody uses it - why can't I come up with something original? In the sunlight, every single word seems hackneyed.

Nobody is original anymore. Nobody has any original style.

We don't know why we should be artists, but we have many reasons why we can't be.