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Just as our taste in lovers is far more revealing than our choice of friends, the object of an artist's obsession can open up doors to their soul that might otherwise remain shut tight. (Vince Aletti)
It's three o'clock in the morning, your back hurts, your arm hurts, you've been in there for ten hours, and there are no sounds except for the occasional fire truck. Finally, you put the brush down and ask yourself, 'Man, what am I doing here?' (John Alexander)
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn... (Louis Armstrong)
It's the addicts that stay with it. They're not necessarily the most talented, they're just the ones that can't get it out of their systems. (Harold Brown)
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. (Winston Churchill)
I do not pursue art. It pursues me. It dogs me throughout my day and never rests. It is the beast I must feed that is never content. I did not choose to be an artist, to create, to express what is in my head. It chose me and I am its slave. (Toni Ciserella)
Most inner-oriented artists share a common characteristic, a certain quality of obsession. (Kenneth Coutts-Smith)
Painting seems to be my obsession. I feel some resentment at all the other things in life that take me away from my studio. This obsession constantly judges all other calls on my time and energy. (Sue Cowan)
I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless. (Bette Davis)
I do not think that obsession is funny or that not being able to stop one's intensity is funny. (Jim Dine)
Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission. (Peter Drucker)
Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins. (George Eliot)
As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete. (James Elkins)
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they chose him and is usually too busy to wonder why. (William Faulkner)
The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work. (Lucian Freud)
While obsessive behavior may be an antisocial plague to societies and communities at large, it's total moxie when lone practitioners catch it. (Robert Genn)
The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. (Vincent van Gogh)
People don't paint for the hell of it. It's a deeply seated thing – a preoccupation – the whole of one's life. (Roger de Grey)
We're not here painting because we want to be. We're here because we have to be! (George De Groat)
Being an artist is not a choice; it is an obsession. (Andrew Hamilton)
I don't see how you can create and not have the feeling that it is the most important, all-consuming thing. (Grace Hartigan)
The 'Badlands' of Alberta, Canada has been a rich source of inspiration to me for years. One might say I'm obsessed, smitten, enchanted, captivated. I rarely paint anything else. (Carol Huggler)
I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits. (Gustav Klimt)
When you start to work you don't want to leave, you don't want to eat, you don't want to sleep. (Hui Lin Liu)
Work is my norm. I have mad energy, insane energy, a kind of stamina in terms of work that's a little crazy. (Sidney Lumet)
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer. (Norman Mailer)
To obsess too virulently is to walk alone in anxiety. But to obsess too little is to wall oneself off from one's own creativity. (Eric Maisel)
I didn't think it was fair to pretend to give of myself when I was so selfishly consumed with my own drives. (Jackie Mason)
The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them. (W. Somerset Maugham)
I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I'd go crazy. (Claude Monet)
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel. (Claude Monet)
The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts. (Henry Moore)
I paint because I have to paint. It's a twitch I can't control. (Jamie R. Morhaim)
I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they're not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It's a dream that won't come true. (Berthe Morisot)
I have to go on writing because I wouldn't be able to go on without writing. It is the only function that works for me, and without that function, I would die. (Farley Mowat)
I still have an insane drive to create and express myself, and it'll never stop because I don't know how to stop it. (Graham Nash)
A day without painting, or at least thinking of something to paint, is a day without breathing. (Luz Maria Perez)
The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them. (Rumi)
I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out. (John Ruskin)
The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted. (Osbert Sitwell)
I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires. (Elizabeth Smart)
It's real art if you have no choice but to do it. (Holly Soloman)
I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good. (Barbra Streisand)
I paint and write because I have no other choice – than to be totally miserable if I don't. My heart and soul cry out until my mind finally decides to go along. (Jackie Strickland)
Sometimes painting becomes so addictive that I once painted for three days without sleep. (Charles Thomson)
I have, at times, been absorbed in my work to the point of complete self-oblivion. Once I worked for thirty-six hours without a break - to complete exhaustion; and while I was in the middle of it I didn't even notice. (Alton S. Tobey)
The act of creating art is not only an addiction, but a dance with an unwilling partner... and I'm gleefully waltzing all the way! (Dorenda Crager Watson)
Need must find idea and method; obsession follows. Obsession cannot occur before idea... As idea leads, the form of one's art emerges, and at its best, an accumulation of painted images leads to a surrogate of the real world... (Hiram Williams)
Be careful what you choose to do consciously, for unless your will is very strong, that is what you may have to do repeatedly and compulsively through the habit-influencing power of the subconscious mind. (Paramahansa Yogananda)
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