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Quotes by Artist

"Our situation here, without any exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive Boston ever to arrive at."


"I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made.."

"Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."

"In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them."

"Assuming roles is something that simply won't work for me, since I don't have a style. None at all."

"As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art."

"When I'm makin' lectures to these universities, I tell 'em I like that little building because when I run short a audience, if I can get three people in there I've got a good crowd."

"Sometimes I don't even pull my shoes off for six weeks at a time, except, you know, just to take a shower. I just take breaks between 24 hours a day, just a break now and then, it don't take me long to rest; maybe 20 to30 minutes sometime, or maybe an hour."

"Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting."


"Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing."

"He who does not value life does not deserve it."


"But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things."


"My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth."


"One must work and dare if one really wants to live."

"Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands."


"I think the art world... is a very small pond, and it's a very inbred pond. They rely on information from an elect elite sect of galleries, primarily in New York."

"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."

"They are only after my money, they are nothing for me."

"My work begun to spread out. And calls to the universities begun to take me out of my garden, you know."

"Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things."

"It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience."

"It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own."

"A good painter is to paint two main things namely men and the working of man's mind."
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