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I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work. (Rumaan Alam)
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)
If I see something and I think it looks nice, I can't help myself - I have to paint it. (Dion Archibald)
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn... (Louis Armstrong)
I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else. (Nicholson Baker)
Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem. (Alfred H. Barr Jr.)
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else. (Charles Baudelaire)
The best painting comes out of compulsions and obsessions, out of deep love or hate, out of intellectual or emotional involvement with something that lies outside the painting itself. (Edward Betts)
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. (Robert Bly)
I wed art. It is my husband, my world, my life dream, the air I breathe. I know nothing else, feel nothing else, think nothing else. (Rosa Bonheur)
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)
There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity. (Charles Bukowski)
I'm so wrapped up in my work that it's often impossible to consider other things in my life. My marriage ended in divorce because of this, my relationship with Holly has suffered by this. (Jim Carrey)
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)
Become addicted to constant and never-ending self-improvement. (Anthony J. D'Angelo)
Nothing wrong with being a workaholic. Without compulsive painters there'd be no compulsive collectors. (Dr. Jack Dalhousie)
It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine. (Charles Darwin)
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 have to be a star like another man has to breathe. (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it's a fact. (Marlene Dietrich)
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)
When I was young, I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious-to-the-point-of-insane reader. (Neil Gaiman)
I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity and inequality, even passion and opportunity. (Frank Gehry)
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)
To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing. (Philip Guston)
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)
I am like the obsessive compulsive who keeps going back to the door to make sure it's locked - I keep going back to my easel to create a painting... (Sandra Taylor Hedges)
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 addicted to self-improvement. The thing is, there's so damn much about myself to improve. (A.J. Jacobs)
I don't have a current obsession. I'm between obsessions. (Tim Jenison)
The people who make it to the top are addicted to their calling. You have to honor the gift God has given you. The people who get the call are the ones who'd be doing whatever it is they love, even if they weren't being paid. (Quincy Jones)
Why this obsession with everything imported? (Abdul Kalam)
I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits. (Gustav Klimt)
I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. (Yayoi Kusama)
I love painting so much that nothing else matters. (Yayoi Kusama)
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)
I have to work, for my soul. (Jennifer Lopez)
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)
It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint. (Alice Neel)
I started producing work with an ecstatic addiction. (Ben Nicholson)
I'm compelled and dedicated to transmitting emotions and I care for very little else. (Sidney Nolan)
I work day and night without sleep. The paintings keep me fired up. (Jules Olitski)
I've decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I've been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head. (Roman Payne)
Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page. (Roman Payne)
A day without painting, or at least thinking of something to paint, is a day without breathing. (Luz Maria Perez)
Don't do what you want to do - do what you cannot leave undone. (Aapo Pukk)
Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse. (Alexander Pushkin)
The compulsion to create is unstoppable. It's a need that has to be filled. (Linds Redding)
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)
I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out. (John Ruskin)
I'm addicted to exercising and I have to do something every day. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
I consider my detailed artistic endeavors as OCD for profit. (Eric Serritella)
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)
Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession. (Anna Deavere Smith)
It's real art if you have no choice but to do it. (Holly Soloman)
It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer. (Freya Stark)
Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession. (Alfred Stieglitz)
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)
I knew neither jealousy nor hate but was possessed by a rage to recreate a new world, the world which my eyes perceived, a world all to myself. I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful. (Maurice de Vlaminck)
What keeps me interested is that I have to do it. It's like people wake up and they have to breathe; I have to write songs; I have to make music. That's like eating or breathing to me. It's that simple. (Diane Warren)
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)
Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it. (Ai Weiwei)
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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