My Creative Comfort Quotes

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.

(Claude Monet)

The creative person finds himself in a state of turmoil, restlessness, emptiness, and unbearable frustration unless he expresses his inner life in some creative way. (Silvano Arieti)

How difficult it is to be simple. (Vincent van Gogh)

I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. (Vincent Van Gogh)

Difficulties increase the nearer we approach our goal. (J.W. von Goethe)

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter. (Jessamyn West)

I have made some progress. Why so late and with such difficulty? Is art really a priesthood that demands the pure in heart who must belong to it entirely? (Paul Cezanne)

I haven't yet managed to capture the colour of this landscape; there are moments when I'm appalled at the colours I'm having to use, I'm afraid what I'm doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying. (Claude Monet in Bordighera, Italy)

In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing. (Vincent van Gogh)

Anyone that witnesses my agitation and frustration in the final hour of a painting would wonder why I even bother. (David Oleski)

I had gotten to the point where I was either going to play the violin much better or I was going to break it over my knee. (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich)

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me... (Claude Monet)

Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good. (Pablo Picasso)

I have once more taken up things that can't be done: water with grasses weaving on the bottom. But I'm always tackling that sort of thing! (Claude Monet)

It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written -- but then, try to do it! (Claude Monet)

I am frequently out of control and, of course, run into lots of trouble. I think I like to create problems for the love of solving them. (Ann Zielinski)

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's. (Joseph Campbell)