Tortured Artist Quotes

“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.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Pain and passion synchronized
comprising unborn, old and wise
Songs of the soul
oh, in torment they are born”
― Frances Livings, During the Hours

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“You have pretty eyes, Flynn. You look like a tortured artist, she said. Uhmm, thank you? I said.”
― Bobby Hall, Supermarket