It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved. [Vincent Van Gogh]
I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.
He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.
It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.
Reading is a stout-hearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slam-dunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.
What we know of others is our personal secret.
The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.
Savoir souffrir sans se plaindre, ça c'est la seule chose pratique, c'est la grande science, la leçon à apprendre, la solution du problème de la vie.[Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life.]
An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.
From out of pain, beauty.
Do not call yourself old. A man is as old as the creative force within him.
To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.
Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.
From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, "Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.
When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.
An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.
After all, the world is still great.
We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.
He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.
The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.
I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.
...that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.
The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.
Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion.
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