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Quotes by Artist

"Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it."
Film,

"Right at the beginning, I didn't know if Miffy was a boy or girl."

"Today we are searching for things in nature that are hidden behind the veil of appearance... We look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature."


"Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums."


"As time goes on, I realize more and more that, beginning in the early 30's, David Smith began setting the precedent for what was to come later for many of us."

"The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense."

"If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens."

"Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle."

"Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know."


"Oh, yes. I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn't like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn't like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy."

"It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it."

"Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can."

"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."

"Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason."

"An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision."

"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory."

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for."

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
Life,

"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"


"What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that."

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing."


"When a system is considered in two different states, the difference in volume or in any other property, between the two states, depends solely upon those states themselves and not upon the manner in which the system may pass from one state to the other."

"Christendom appears clearly to me to be one of those trifling, insignificant arts, which has never been of any substantial advantage to mankind."


"For me context is the key - from that comes the understanding of everything."

"It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory."

"There are always flowers for those who want to see them."

"One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer."
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