“An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond…. a good feeling about his art.”

Poetry and the World, Ecco Press,1988

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond…. a good feeling about his a…" by Robert Pinsky?
Robert Pinsky photo
Robert Pinsky 21
American poet, editor, literary critic, academic. 1940

Related quotes

Gretchen Rubin photo

“The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Ted Malloch photo

“When all benefits are promised by the state, nobody need feel grateful for them.”

Ted Malloch (1952) American businessman

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 28.

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“Women need to feel loved and men need to feel needed.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

Source: Riding Shotgun

Francis Bacon (artist) photo

“I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him.”

Francis Bacon (artist) (1909–1992) Irish-born British painter

As quoted in The Artist Observed: 28 interviews with contemporary artists (1991) by John Gruen, p. 3
Context: I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

Trevor Noah photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Ivo Andrič photo

“Whenever a government feels the need of promising peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite.”

Ivo Andrič (1892–1975) novelist, short story writer

Source: The bridge on the Drina, 1945, Ch. 17

Related topics