top of page
"I am isolated as an artist, not as a person."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Isolation quotes

"Nobody the dead man & Nobody the livingNobody is giving in & Nobody is givingNobody hears me but just Nobody caresNobody fears me but Nobody just staresNobody belongs to me & Nobody remainsNo Nobody knows nothingAll that remains are remains."

"During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide."

"Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. The point of this language of 'intention and 'personal responsibility is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. 'Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."

"One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!"

"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."

"I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while."

"All along - not only since she left, but for a decade before - I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who - because no one thought she was a person - had no one to really talk to."

"And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time."
Explore more quotes by Howard Hodgkin

"I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself."

"My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms."

"A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy."

"I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings."

"I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing."

"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."

"In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute."

"I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient."
bottom of page