Tortured Artist Quotes

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?

I thought I saw him for what he was-or what I thought he was. And he was talented, no doubt about that. But, he thought his talent was based on misery and that if he became happy it would just go. He believed that.

Nothing that's ever happened has taken away the optimist in me. It's always, "Whatever-let's go to Disneyland." Yes, I have my bleak, tortured-artist moments, but you have to hold on to what's positive.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture

Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself.

I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.

If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.

Comics and actors come from such a wide variety of backgrounds and there's a theory that all comedians had tortured youths.

I think that we all have to have that rite of passage of dating the tortured artist who seems cooler than we think we are; we aspire to be like them, and we're excited that somebody is turning us on to new music or a new lifestyle.

Despair and Genius are too oft connected

Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny.

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.

I'm going to write a whole pilot and see if anyone's interested, and if not then I'll just live out the tortured life instead of showing it on TV.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Art is a kind of illness.