Torture The Artist Quotes

You, have this whole tall, dark stranger thing going on. Not to mention the tortured artist bit. And you, have that whole blonde cool and collected perfect smart thing going on. You're the boy all the girls want to rebel with. You, are the unattainable girl in homeroom who never gives a guy the time of day.

What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.

He didn't see me looking at him, but I could tell the ceremony was having the same effect on him. He was enraptured. It was a rare and sweet look for him, reminding me of the tortured artist that lived beneath the sarcasm. I liked that about Adrian—not the tortured part, but the way he could feel so deeply and then transform those emotions into art.

I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it. And I get it. The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I'd rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone's life.

I just shook my head, knowing this was him evading the question. You," I said, "have this whole tall, dark stranger thing going on. Not to mention the tortured artist bit." Bit?" You know what I mean." He shook his head, clearly discounting this description. And you," he said, "have that whole blonde, cool and collected, perfect smart girl thing going on." You're the boy all the girls want to rebel with," I said. You," he replied, "are the unattainable girl in homeroom who never gives a guy the time of day.

He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total.

That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.

If you're going to have the tortured soul of an artist, then you might as well create some art while you're at it.

You know, there is only one letter's difference between lonely and lovely," I told him once when he was down. "There is only one letter's difference between loner and loser," he retorted.

The myth of 'You have to be a tortured artist' is a myth," says Lin. "You can have a happy, healthy life and still go to all these crazy dark places in your writing, and then go play with your child and hug your wife.

It’s always the men, isn’t it, talking about writing from a place of pain. Maybe try writing from joy. We get it, the world is hard. Which is precisely why I write: to escape it. Calm down with this tortured artist shit already, my God. –June French in Cosmopolitan

What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals – at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not even one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time, the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.

Donneven," I said, in my best Monica imitation, and he laughed. "We're not talking about me." "We could be," he said, as I watched Bert take note of a group of what looked like ninth graders who had just come into the living room. "I'm not gorgeous," I said. "Sure you are." I just shook my head, knowing this was him evading the question. "You," I said, "have this whole tall, dark stranger thing going on. Not to mention the tortured artist bit." "Bit?" "You know what I mean." He shook his head, clearly discounting this description. "And you," he said, "have that whole blonde, cool and collected, perfect smart girl thing going on." "You're the boy all the girls want to rebel with," I said. "You," he replied, "are the unattainable girl in homeroom who never gives a guy the time of day.

Ich weiß nicht, ob die verdummte Unterhaltung nach und nach dem kollektiven Intellekt unserer Nation geschadet hat oder ob die geistige Faulheit des Publikums zuerst da war und wir sie nur bedient haben.

What they don't teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

What - what - what are you doing?" he demanded. "I am almost six hundred years old," Magnus claimed, and Ragnor snorted, since Magnus changed his age to suit himself every few weeks. Magnus swept on. "It does seem about time to learn a musical instrument." He flourished his new prize, a little stringed instrument that looked like a cousin of the lute that the lute was embarrassed to be related to. "It's called a charango. I am planning to become a charanguista!" "I wouldn't call that an instrument of music," Ragnor observed sourly. "An instrument of torture, perhaps." Magnus cradled the charango in his arms as if it were an easily offended baby. "It's a beautiful and very unique instrument! The sound box is made from an armadillo. Well, a dried armadillo shell." "That explains the sound you're making," said Ragnor. "Like a lost, hungry armadillo." "You are just jealous," Magnus remarked calmly. "Because you do not have the soul of a true artiste like myself." "Oh, I am positively green with envy," Ragnor snapped. "Come now, Ragnor. That's not fair," said Magnus. "You know I love it when you make jokes about your complexion." Magnus refused to be affected by Ragnor's cruel judgments. He regarded his fellow warlock with a lofty stare of superb indifference, raised his charango, and began to play again his defiant, beautiful tune. They both heard the staccato thump of frantically running feet from within the house, the swish of skirts, and then Catarina came rushing out into the courtyard. Her white hair was falling loose about her shoulders, and her face was the picture of alarm. "Magnus, Ragnor, I heard a cat making a most unearthly noise," she exclaimed. "From the sound of it, the poor creature must be direly sick. You have to help me find it!" Ragnor immediately collapsed with hysterical laughter on his windowsill. Magnus stared at Catarina for a moment, until he saw her lips twitch. "You are conspiring against me and my art," he declared. "You are a pack of conspirators." He began to play again. Catarina stopped him by putting a hand on his arm. "No, but seriously, Magnus," she said. "That noise is appalling." Magnus sighed. "Every warlock's a critic." "Why are you doing this?" "I have already explained myself to Ragnor. I wish to become proficient with a musical instrument. I have decided to devote myself to the art of the charanguista, and I wish to hear no more petty objections." "If we are all making lists of things we wish to hear no more . . . ," Ragnor murmured. Catarina, however, was smiling. "I see," she said. "Madam, you do not see." "I do. I see it all most clearly," Catarina assured him. "What is her name?" "I resent your implication," Magnus said. "There is no woman in the case. I am married to my music!" "Oh, all right," Catarina said. "What's his name, then?" His name was Imasu Morales, and he was gorgeous.

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.

The real artist with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire and does it again!" "All art is a metaphor it's by telling you one thing when your mean something else. The Old Man in the Sea is not about fishing!" "Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it’s done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

You have to question a cinematic culture which preaches artistic expression, and yet would support a decision that is clearly a product of a patriarchy-dominant society, which tries to control how women are depicted on screen. The MPAA is okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario which is both complicit and complex. It’s misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman’s sexual presentation of self. I consider this an issue that is bigger than this film

You're such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You're a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.

I've taken the liberty of giving us a full moon. I've arranged for all stoplights to stay green. I've made some phone calls to make sure you keep smiling. I've reserved the space underneath our feet. I've gone all out for you, so why don't you go with me?

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

With their aggression, intensity, self-absorption, and endless self-promotion, our competitors don’t realize how they jeopardize their own efforts (to say nothing of their sanity). We will challenge the myth of the self-assured genius for whom doubt and introspection is foreign, as well as challenge the myth of pained, tortured artist who must sacrifice his health for his work. Where they are both divorced from reality and divorced from other people, we will be deeply connected, aware, and learning from all of it.

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don’t buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that’s a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make.” This

Pain and passion synchronized comprising unborn, old and wise Songs of the soul oh, in torment they are born

Artists are terminally dissatisfied. With life. With love. With their work. You like being tortured, don’t you, little Luna? Sadness has a bittersweet aftertaste. Keeps us going.” He lit up his joint. “Being an artist is a miserable job. You’re pregnant with your work, only to give the baby away. An entire year of careful strokes of a brush, just to have someone else buy the painting.

Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

The witch-burnings did not take place during the “Dark Ages,” as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, “men’s” minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular “Enlightenment,” in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.

By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow," Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother's words, "told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them- all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.

The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears—though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence— still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military “aid” helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly.

Sieh sie dir an", sagte Vincent. "Alle finden einfach zueinander. Sie kommen so mühelos zusammen. Warum passiert mir das nicht?

more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

You have pretty eyes, Flynn. You look like a tortured artist, she said. Uhmm, thank you? I said.

The purpose of art is to create heavens to balance the world because there are so many hells in the world, there are wars, tortures and oppressions, there is unhappiness etc.

Was uns nicht umbringt, bewirkt nur, dass wir sterben wollen.

He ground his teeth together, the torture of it almost more than he could bear. The urge to pull her to him was overwhelming, but to do that would cost him dearly, for no doubt she would run out the door, damning him with every step. This was Lorelei, the artist, and she didn't see him as a man. Right now, he was about as human as the ridiculous fruit she'd painted in the past. And if he played along with her wants, perhaps she'd let him show her his...banana.

Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pain of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the some times, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplies as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many million upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and i f the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it sop rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

The Russians opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers the Germans used for other purposes they seized his tongue and yanked. The pain made tears spring to his eyes and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño, cunt. With the pliers in his mouth the exclamation was transformed, coming out as the word kunst. The Russian who spoke German stared at him in surprise. The Sevillan shouted Kunst, Kunst, and wept in pain. The word Kunst, in German, means art, and that was how the bilingual soldier heard it and he said that the son of a bitch was an artist or something. The soldiers who were torturing the Sevillan removed the pliers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery. Art. The thing that soothes wild beasts.

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits. The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you! You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes. The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.

Artists are nothing but expert time killers, filling up the hours by entertaining themselves. But the ones who think they're changing the universe are truly delusional. Writers who believe communication makes a difference are the most delusional of all. Every day people find better, faster ways to communicate and guess what? The same percentage of humanity remains ignorant and hateful. We still torture and murder for profit. We still rape and steal, and we step gingerly over people who are starving to death so we won't get any of their shit on our shoes on our way to the espresso stand.

he’s… hot and cold. I don’t like it. That shit’s manipulative.” John chewed thoughtfully before he answered. “Ordinarily I’d agree with you,” he said. “But I swear down, he might be the sweetest man I’ve ever met. He’s very ‘tortured artist’. You know?” “‘Tortured artist’ is code for ‘attractive arsehole’.

Where they are setting up the market, it used to be a place for torture,” Julien remarked, indicating the place in front of them. “Wow,” Ava said. “I know I said I wanted to ditch the romanticized idea of Paris with couples and hearts and flowers but I wasn’t thinking of touring all the places they once did waterboarding.

I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal. For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness.

It has been delicately wrought," said the artist, calmly. "As I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence--call it magnetism, or what you will. In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who instilled his own life into it. It has already lost its beauty; in a few moments more its mechanism would be irreparably injured.

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!

The cases of great mathematicians with mental illness have enormous resonance for modern pop writers and filmmakers. This has to do mostly with the writers'/directors' own prejudices and receptivities, which in turn are functions of what you could call our era's particular archetypal template. It goes without saying that these templates change over time. The Mentally Ill Mathematician seems now in some ways to be what the Knight Errant, Mortified Saint, Tortured Artist, and Mad Scientist have been for other eras: sort of our Prometheus, the one who goes to forbidden places and returns with gifts we all can use but he alone pays for. That's probably a bit overblown, at least in some cases. But Cantor fits the template better than most. And the reason for this are a lot more interesting than whatever his problems and symptoms were.

if you are cursed with perfectionism, then you’re absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself, to berate yourself and others. Since this ideal is an impossibility, you can never live up to it. You are merely in love with this ideal, and there is no end to the self-torture, to the self-nagging, self-castigating. It hides under the mask of “self-improvement.” It never works.

I felt my power in the high, desperate sound of his pleasure. I felt my error in how little I thought it would mean. I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

I am interested in your opinion about the myth of the tortured artist, and its usefulness for a society badly in need of healthy models of creativity. Most of the writers I know are struggling to make important art, but they are also struggling, equally hard, to live healthly, connected, value-creating daily lives. Do you think we are moving past praising the glamour of the nonfunctioning creative genius? I hope that we are. I find the idea of unsupported genius deeply distasteful: it disrespects mothers, and fathers, and teachers, and lovers, and all the accidents and opportunities and coincidences that conspire, along the way, to help create and launch an artistic sensibility. We need a new model: one that doesn’t depend on outmoded gender norms, destructive values, and the profoundly ugly idea that to be indebted is to be demeaned. Kindness is a core value for any artist, but most especially for a fiction writer: a self-centered person can’t see the world from another person’s point of view.

It shouldn't make any difference, but Friday and Saturday nights are the worst. They're the worst because the loneliness is magnified. The best you can do is hope that there is someone else like you out there, but if there is, you will never meet this person because she doesn't get out either. So, you're left with your thoughts, and your thoughts are living people in your brain who call and hang up and lounge around like armed security guards who happen to be beautiful. In between these thoughts, you think about what's going on out there. The girl of your dreams is being ravaged by a man who doesn't have a care in the world. Just to hear her voice would make you happy for a week, but he gets to spend the day and night with her and thinks nothing of it. (…), there are boyfriends and girlfriends, people in love, wide awake. They hang out. They hang out. They hang out. They do nothing worthwhile except each other. Friends, friends, friends. Fiends. Inside jokes. There are so many stupid conversations going on right now. You could be having a meaningful conversation with a taxi driver. You could talk to him about how Travis Bickle's taxi was a metaphor for loneliness. (…) You have a gray tint on your contact lenses. But you have your work. They don't have that. They are cowards. Everyone seems so afraid to be alone. It takes strength to lie there alone and take it. They just want to copulate, and that's their biggest concern of the night. You want a tragedy. An assassination. A massacre. An earthquake. A city falling to the ground. Something to get the people on TV to be on the same page as you.

Tortured Genius.” By this, he did not mean the artist or musician who suffers from mental health issues, but in the context of ownership. No matter how obvious his or her failing, or how valid the criticism, a Tortured Genius, in this sense, accepts zero responsibility for mistakes, makes excuses, and blames everyone else for their failings (and those of their team). In their mind, the rest of the world just can’t see or appreciate the genius in what they are doing. An individual with a Tortured Genius mind-set can have catastrophic impact on a team’s performance.

You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don’t embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That’s damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you’re alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers about the problems you are facing. Someone you know and trust. There is no shame in asking for help.

Gibbon who worked nonstop and seemed free of the self-doubt and crises of confidence that dog us mere mortals, there is a William James or a Franz Kafka, great minds who wasted time, waited vainly for inspiration to strike, experienced torturous blocks and dry spells, were racked by doubt and insecurity. In reality, most of the people in this book are somewhere in the middle—committed to daily work but never entirely confident of their progress; always wary of the one off day that undoes the streak. All of them made the time to get their work done. But there is infinite variation in how they structured their lives to do so.

You," I said, "have this whole tall, dark stranger thing going on. Not to mention the tortured artist bit." "Bit?" "You know what I mean." He shook his head, clearly discounting this description. "And you," he said, "have that whole blonde, cool and collected, perfect smart girl thing going on." "You're the boy all the girls want to rebel with," I said. "You," he replied, "are the unattainable girl in the homeroom who never gives a guy the time of the day." There was a blast of music from inside, a thump of bass beat, then quiet again. "I'm not perfect," I said. "Not even close." "I'm not tortured. Unless you count this conversation.

This universe was not conceived in beauty. It was conceived in tragedy and travail. It evolved, and continues to be, only in the throes of desperate struggle. Pain, and ugliness, and brute force rule it. “In the midst of that continuous hurricane of destruction and death there are born from time to time men who resolve this disorder. They create another vision from the fire and dust of disaster. They are poets, and musicians, and artists. That is their answer to the ugliness of the world. They do not ask to be understood. They do not even ask to be liked. But without them we should find the universe an intolerable habitation. They lessen its terrors, and ameliorate the eternal torture of its unanswered and unanswerable questions. They are a gallant company. They go singing down the highways of the world, and the echoes of their words comfort us when they have passed. To that small company—that company of God’s own elect—Robert Callicott belonged.

Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now.

On ne peut pas dire que le petit bourgeois n'a rien lu. Il a tout lu, tout dévoré au contraire. Seulement son cerveau fonctionne à la manière de certains appareils digestifs de type élémentaire. Il filtre. Et le filtre ne laisse passer que ce qui peut alimenter la couenne de la bonne conscience bourgeoise. Les Vietnamiens, avant l'arrivée des Français dans leur pays, étaient gens de culture vieille, exquise et raffinée. Ce rappel indispose la Banque d'Indochine. Faites fonctionner l'oublioir ! Ces Malgaches, que l'on torture aujourd'hui, étaient, il y a moins d'un siècle, des poètes, des artistes, des administrateurs ? Chut ! Bouche cousue ! Et le silence se fait profond comme un coffre-fort ! Heureusement qu'il reste les nègres. Ah ! les nègres ! parlons-en des nègres ! Eh bien, oui, parlons-en. Des empires soudanais ? Des bronzes du Bénin ? De la sculpture Shongo ? Je veux bien ; ça nous changera de tant de sensationnels navets qui adornent tant de capitales européennes. De la musique africaine. Pourquoi pas? Et de ce qu'ont dit, de ce qu'ont vu les premiers explorateurs... Pas de ceux qui mangent aux râteliers des Compagnies ! Mais des d'Elbée, des Marchais, des Pigafetta ! Et puis de Frobénius ! Hein, vous savez qui c'est, Frobénius ? Et nous lisons ensemble : « Civilisés jusqu'à la moelle des os ! L'idée du nègre barbare est une invention européenne. » Le petit bourgeois ne veut plus rien entendre. D'un battement d'oreilles, il chasse l'idée. L'idée, la mouche importune.

Refined cruelty as virtue. Here is a morality which rests entirely on the drive to distinction do not think too highly of it! For what kind of a drive is that and what thought lies behind it? We want to make the sight of us painful to another and to awaken in him the feeling of envy and of his own impotence and degradation; by dropping on to his tongue a drop of our honey, and while doing him this supposed favour looking him keenly and mockingly in the eyes, we want to make him savour the bitterness of his fate. This person has become humble and is now perfect in his humility seek for those whom he has for long wished to torture with it! you will find them soon enough! That person is kind to animals and is admired on account of it but there are certain people on whom he wants to vent his cruelty by this means. There stands a great artist: the pleasure he anticipated in the envy of his defeated rivals allowed his powers no rest until he had become great how many bitter moments has his becoming great not cost the souls of others! The chastity of the nun: with what punitive eyes it looks into the faces of women who live otherwise! how much joy in revenge there is in these eyes! The theme is brief, the variations that might be played upon it might be endless but hardly tedious for it is still a far too paradoxical and almost paininducing novelty that the morality of distinction is in its ultimate foundation pleasure in refined cruelty. In its ultimate foundation in this case that means: in its first generation. For when the habit of some distinguishing action is inherited, the thought that lies behind it is not inherited with it (thoughts are not hereditary, only feelings): and provided it is not again reproduced by education, even the second generation fails to experience any pleasure in cruelty in connection with it, but only pleasure in the habit as such. This pleasure, however, is the first stage of the 'good'.

Art is pain, right? Everybody knew that the best artists were tortured souls. People with perfectly happy lives probably sat at home and did cross-stitch kits of kittens in baskets.

The reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them up. Everybody’s too scared to deal with children all the time, so we reject them and send them away and torture them. The ones who survive are the conformists—their bodies are cut to the size of the suits—the ones we label good. The ones who don’t fit the suits either are put in mental homes or become artists.

They are the eyes of a poet, or painter—an artist, a tortured soul.

what are we to say about the Catholic military chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945? Father George Zabelka, chaplain for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb squadrons, later came to repent of his complicity in the bombing of civilians, but his account of that time is a stunning judgment on the church’s acquiescence in violence. To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as 1 see it…. I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best—at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…. Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord. I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point—so far.4 It is difficult to read such accounts without recalling the story of Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem, because “the things that make for peace” were hidden from their eyes (Luke 19:41

That’s the biggest myth, right there: Kurt Cobain, the tortured artist. People don’t realize that guy was a funny motherfucker.

I kept sniffing her, and I stroked her neck—like an artist would with an empty canvas and a fine brush.

If a tortured artist hurls a nasty email at 10 p.m. and then a love song at 11:20, are you up or down?

We had sat for an hour, tortured by the sight of this demented female encountering, on her lone quest for her departed soul, all manner of peculiar hallucinations.

Sitte called himself a “lawyer for the artistic side,” aiming at “a modus vivendi” with the modern system of city building.41 This self-definition is important, revealing as it does Sitte’s deeply held assumption that “artistic” and “modern” were somehow antithetical terms. The “modern” to him meant the technical and rational aspects of city building, the primacy of what he repeatedly referred to as “traffic, hygiene, etc.” The emotionally effective (wirkungsvoll) and picturesque (malerisch) on the one hand, and the efficient and practical on the other, were by nature contradictory and opposed, and their opposition would increase as modern life became ever more governed by material considerations.42 The lust for profit, dictating the achievement of maximum density, governed land use and street plan. Economic aims expressed themselves in the ruthless geometrical systems of city layout—rectilinear, radial, and triangular. “Modern systems!” Sitte complained, “Yes! To conceive everything systematically, and never to deviate a hair’s breadth from the formula once it’s established, until all genius is tortured to death, all joyful sense of life suffocated, that is the mark of our time.”43

You separate the Sunday sections and there are endless identical lines of print with people living somewhere in the words and the strange contained reality of paper and ink seeps through the house for a week and when you look at the page and distinguish from line from another it begins to gather you into it and there are people being tortured halfway around the world, who speak another language, and you have conversations with them more or less uncontrollably until you become aware you are doing it and then you stop, seeing whatever is in front of you at the time, like half a glass of juice in your husband's hand.

using alcohol to unlock creativity, calling it a tonic for the “tortured artist,” and even simply labeling it “a good man’s failing”—are all fallacies adopted for sensational and self-glorifying reasons to theatricalize and justify the mundane, singular, and selfish tragedy that excessive drinking creates.

What do you think, Kaarz?” Standing next to him in the recently pressurized but still-cold office annex, Teela knew she was once again being tested. Every time she was around the Old Man, he did that. She’d heard that it took awhile for him to trust you - but once he did you were golden in his eyes. It seemed that everybody worth the salt in their bodies who worked for him wanted him to feel that way. And why shouldn’t they? A missive of recommendation from Stinex, even just a line or two, was worth just about any conceivable torture one could imagine and endure. It was a ticket for the hyperlane that could lead to wealth, fame, and the most desirable thing of all: Freedom. The freedom to design what one wished, to give free rein to one’s artistic expression, to create something that might truly outlast the ages, that might - Teela realized that the Old Man was waiting patiently for an answer to his question.

This is the problem with creative people; their self-image is divided into two parts - one thinks they're a genius who will one day create a masterpiece of such breathtaking brilliance that it will still be discussed with reverence hundreds of years later; the other part thinks they are trash raccoons rooting around in the dark and coming up with nothing but more trash. There is no in-between. It's either 'super genius' or 'trash raccoon,' and somehow these parts coexist within the head of one very tortured artist.

the head of one very tortured artist.

In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secularized” than the United States. It consisted mostly of artists’ depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion. Many critics sneered. All those old paintings about someone being tortured to death! Why did we need to look at rooms full of such stuff? Fortunately, the general public ignored the critics and turned up in droves to see works of art, which, like the crucifixion itself, seem to carry a power beyond theory and beyond suspicion. The Gallery’s director, Neil McGregor, moved from that role to become director of the British Museum, a job he did with great distinction and effect for the next decade. The final piece he acquired in the latter capacity, before moving to a similar position in Berlin, was a simple but haunting cross made from fragments of a small boat. The boat, which been carrying refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, was wrecked off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on October 3, 2013. Of the 500 people on board, 349 drowned. A local craftsman, Francesco Tuccio, was deeply distressed that nothing more could have been done to save people, and he made several crosses out of fragments of the wrecked vessel. One was carried by Pope Francis at the memorial service for the survivors. The British Museum contacted Mr. Tuccio, and he made a cross especially for the museum, thanking the authorities there for drawing attention to the suffering that this small wooden object would symbolize. Why the cross rather than anything else?

the love of Francesca and Paolo, often essayed by artists, yet never rendered, even by Ary Scheffer, as Dante would have had it, and as it was rendered here. There were no vulgarities of a fabled Hell; there were the two, alone in that true torture — Ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria —  yet happy, because together. Her face and form were in full light, his in shadow. Heart beating against heart, their arms round each other, they looked down into each other’s eyes. On his face were the fierce passions, against which he had had no strength, mingled with deep and yearning regret for the fate he had drawn in with his own. On hers, lifted up to him, was all the love at sight of which he who beheld it “swooned even as unto death;” the love — — placer si forte, Che come vedi ancor non m’abbandona — the love which made hell, paradise; and torture together, dearer than heaven alone.

The soul of an artist is a tortured one, forever capturing their version of reality.

- Galima gauti saulės smūgį, bet mėnulio smūgio negausi.

To be forever cursed to stare at a blank canvas is truly tortures for an artist".

Artists are terminally dissatisfied. With life. With love. With their work. You like being tortured, don’t you, little Luna?

I thought about how in movies, usually action movies, a cheap way of getting the audience to invest in the plot is to endanger the life of a dog. There can be fifty men graphically terminated by machine-gun fire or an entire building full of workers destroyed, but no one will stand for a cute little dog being killed. And almost always, the dog's life is spared to the relief of the audience.

Michelangelo was the world's first tortured artist. "My delight is in melancholy," he said, a statement that would later become the unofficial rallying cry for countless generations of sullen artists dressed entirely in black.

Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.

There’s a well-known stereotype that artists are tortured souls. I guess in a way it’s true.

I magine a civilization here on earth that exists covertly inside and alongside of those we know about, with access to the most advanced technologies, technologies straight off the drawing boards of Hollywood production companies and special effects artists, a civilization with nearly bottomless sources of funding, staging events for the gullible, torturing others and driving them into mental and emotional breakdown, and waging a covert war with its own members using its own “apocalyptic technologies,” and masking that war behind the perfect plausible deniability: mother nature. This breakaway civilization, moreover, has its own ideology, and its own dubious “morality”, as was evidenced by its first real incarnation: Nazi Germany. Unlike Nazi Germany, or for that matter, civilizations in general, it has no “core area” where it is centered; it comprises not one nation, but many; its peoples are drawn from all groups and languages, for it speaks but one language, the language of power. It is, in part, the resurrection of Atlantis, and in part, like a bad nightmare version of superhero comic books, with the villains, and not the superheroes, possessing all the superhuman powers and technologies. If the idea of such a breakaway civilization sounds fanciful or even absurd, then hold on, because this book attempts to outline its components, structure, and initial postwar history.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder. It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were—like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long—at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger. And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air—but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate. But this war...the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

Show me the artist who is not insane For all art is suffering, torture and pain We dream in colors you can not find For we are the artists, you are the blind." -Halber Tod, Cotardist Poet

An artist does not have a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

Jebsen, former international playboy turned dodgy businessman; a young man of cynicism, black humor, deep intellect, and physical frailty; the chain-smoking Anglophile dandy who took up spying in order not to fight, but who defied the Nazis because he believed, above all, in friendship. He was unable to resist worldly temptations, but he resisted his Gestapo torturers to the end. Like many ordinary, flawed people, he did not know his own courage until war revealed it. Jebsen might easily have turned history in a disastrous direction to save his own skin, and he chose not to. Agent Artist was not a conventional D-Day hero, but he was a hero nonetheless.

painting, the world over, has struck a varied balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fifteenth century Western painting began to turn from its age-old concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it, towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as complete an imitation as possible of the outside world. The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them. Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.a The

A younger colleague once asked Liszt why he didn’t keep a diary. “To live one’s life is hard enough,” he replied. “Why write down all the misery? It would resemble nothing more than the inventory of a torture chamber.

Was ist trauriger: ältere Menschen wegen allem, was sie gesehen, gehabt und verloren? Oder Kinder ohne jeden blassen Schimmer von allem, was sie sehen, haben und verlieren werden? Das hier war noch trauriger: ein Kind mit der bedrückenden Weisheit eines alten Menschen.

Mir fiel auf, dass die scheußlichsten Orte offenbar die hellste Beleuchtung haben, solche langen Leuchtstoffröhren. Seminarräume, Krankenhäuser, Arztpraxen, Büros, öffentliche Gebäude: Alle von mir gefürchteten Örtlichkeiten haben eine derartige Beleuchtung. Ihr Licht ist niemals schmeichelhaft, selbst dein kleinster Makel tritt hervor. Diese Leuchten kreischen: "Sieh her, das ist es! Das ist deine Wirklichkeit! Sieh sie dir an! Sie ist so häßlich!" So ein Licht wirft keine Schatten. Alles ist perfekt ausgeleuchtet und nicht zu übersehen.

An Stelle gut geschriebener, geistreicher Produkte haben wir der Öffentlichkeit eine geistlose Mischung aus Sex, Gewalt und Dummheit präsentiert. Krischnamurti war es wohl, der sinngemäß gesagt hat: "Wenn Künstlern nichts einfällt, sagen sie es mit Sex." - Ein Befund, dem die Musikvideos, Filmhits und TV-Shows nur allzusehr entsprechen.

Ich muss daran glauben, dass sich Menschen ändern können. Vielleicht irre ich mich, das ist sogar wahrscheinlich , aber ich muss daran glauben, damit alles andere einen Sinn ergibt.

Pablo recognizes the brushwork and cramped composition, but also how both something torturous and transcendent are conveyed. He’s seen this artist before. “This is that painter you spoke of with Manyac on the first day, the deranged one with syphilis.” “So some venereologist says. The fellow’s name was Vincent. Gave him a showing a few

Pablo recognizes the brushwork and cramped composition, but also how both something torturous and transcendent are conveyed. He’s seen this artist before. “This is that painter you spoke of with Manyac on the first day, the deranged one with syphilis.

And, no, I haven't published anything yet. But i try to tell myself that my personal suffering will make me a better writer. Tortured artist and all that.