“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”
Source: Antic Hay
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Aldous Huxley 290
English writer 1894–1963Related quotes
“Be happy with who you are and what you do, and you can do anything you want.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101

"Artistic Freedom"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)
Context: I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.

“Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.”
NPR Interview http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612364 with Pirsig (1974)

“As an artist, you’re never happy with anything you do. It’s part of the process.”
As quoted in "In conversation with Kate Bush" by Elio Iannacci in MacLeans (28 November 2016) https://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/in-conversation-with-kate-bush/
Context: As an artist, you’re never happy with anything you do. It’s part of the process. You’re never really happy. I’m certainly not. That’s a good thing. It means you’re always striving to do better. You hope the next piece will be better.

Source: 60 Years A Priest: An Interview with Archbishop Alfred Hughes https://nds.edu/blog-entry/60-years-a-priest-an-interview-with-archbishop-alfred-hughes/

Playboy Interview http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm (1978)
“These Are Not Psalms”, p. 124
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Source: The Roving Mind (1983), Ch. 25
Context: How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.