Art

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.

[I am] only a public entertainer, who has understood his time.

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.

How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

[ On women writers :] As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

I hate flowers—I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

I get a little Verlaine

For what links us are elemental experiences—emotions—forces that have no intrinsic language and must be imagined as art if they are to be contemplated at all.

An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: “Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!”

When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

One of those “Two Cultures” is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such “physics” and such “humanities”?

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key, perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.

[ On the completion of the Sistine chapel ceiling :] I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace .

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.