Artist Quotes

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...

What is Drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Letter to his brother Theo

Vincent van Gogh

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization.

Jacob Getlar Smith

Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.

Some of the greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.

On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside.

Herbert Ponting

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

Nicolas Bentley

If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance.

Richard Hamilton (artist)

The running shoe... could be called the Swiss Army knife of footwear... What appeal is there to a shoe whose only selling point is comfort?

There comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse.

You don't have to agree with Trump but the mob can't make me not love him. We are both dragon energy.

Success based on anything but internal fulfillment is bound to be empty.

Martha Friedman

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

I wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.

When you are interested in life more than you are in painting, then your paintings can come to life.

Writers have written eloquently of the joys of walking, but the magic of walking is something more than pleasure. It is a true magic, a psychophysical alchemy, which transforms the body and the mind.

Wait a minute, can't you? I've only got three hands.

I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse

I don't care for Lady Macbeth in the streetwalking scene.

Edward Linley Sambourne

Cezanne was fated, as his passion was immense, to be immensely neglected, immensely misunderstood, and now, I think, immensely overrated.

A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth.