British Artist Quotes

Francis Bacon (artist)

Henry Fox Talbot

Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Lear

Lucian Freud

John Tenniel

Cecil Beaton

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

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

A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.

I'll thank thee when approaching death
Would quench life's feeble ember,
For thou wouldst even renew my breath
With thy sweet word 'Remember'!

Branwell Brontë

This century has needed witnesses more than it has needed artists. The camera asserts what it has seen. The artists are just looking.

If there are singles who find the waters of singleness dark and deep, who feel, 'I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head; all his waves go over me,' this is my message to you concerning singleness: Be of good cheer, my brother, my sister; I feel the bottom, and it is good.

Margaret Clarkson

There are places, just as there are people and objects... whose relationship of parts creates a mystery.

I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define, or remember, only desire

Edward Burne-Jones

I am a simple man and I use simple materials: Ivory Black, Vermilion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Flake White and no medium. That's all I've ever used in my paintings.

The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly Just think of Rodin, how he dealt with people of all ages. I have the feeling that I'm alive, I have a body I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and vital. It's a kind of process of energizing myself by my belief that the classical tradition of art that we've inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.

Only an open mind is big enough to contain the secrets of the universe.

Vera Stanley Alder

Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers.

Chris Priestley

So small, so blue, in grassy places / My flowers raise / Their tiny faces.

Cicely Mary Barker

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

Marcus Sedgwick

The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.

Terence Donovan (photographer)

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

You're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star.

I always ask the sitter if they want truth or flattery. They always ask for truth, and I always give them flattery.

All the famous people had had an awful time. One of them had a drunken father. Another had a stammer. Another had to wash hundreds of dirty bottles. They had all had what was called a difficult childhood. Clearly you had to have one if you wanted to become famous.

Take the very hardest thing in your life - the place of difficulty, outward or inward, and expect God to triumph gloriously in that very spot. Just there He can bring your soul into blossom.

There are self-styled "anarcho-capitalists" (not to be confused with anarchists of any persuasion), who want the state abolished as a regulator of capitalism, and government handed over to capitalists.

I like the philosophy of the sandwich, as it were. It typifies my attitude to life, really. It's all there, it's fun, it looks good, and you don't have to wash up afterwards.

Although the great revolution of 1793 changed the whole face of France both politically and socially, it failed to emancipate the twin arts of painting and literature. In each case one tradition was succeeded by another, and nearly forty years elapsed before the new spirit completely broke through the barriers set up by a past generation.

Wynford Dewhurst

Well, if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it.

Bruce Bairnsfather

Please wash your hands before leaving the twentieth century.