I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief.

By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories – stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalise our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

Every love story is a ghost story.

Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Great artists suffer for the people.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope.

The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art.

In my Craft or Sullen Art
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
. On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and palms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,