Others

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

O may my heart’s truth

It’s with my brush that I make love.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if in caves.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if in caves.

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

I seem to have been like a child playing on the sea shore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.

For most of my reading I go back to the old ones – for comfort.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image.

Il maestro di color che sanno.

They gave it me,—for an un-birthday present.

and nothing quite so least as truth —i say though hate were why men breathe— because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all