Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.
When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.
You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?
I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.
It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.
The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
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 know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can't take the time to know.
War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.
I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I'd rather be doing something I wanted to do. I'd walk it again.
There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees... sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces.
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.
I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do – no matter who they are. Isn't it enough just to express yourself?
The meaning of a word - to me - is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.
I have not worked at all... Nothing seems worth putting down - I seem to have nothing to say - it appalls me but that is the way it is.
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily.
Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.
It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.
One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ... very large white pillows.
It always seems to me that so few people live - they just seem to exist and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't live always - til we die physically.
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.
A week ago it was the mountains I thought the most wonderful, and today it's the plains. I guess it's the feeling of bigness in both that carries me away.
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
When you get so that you can't see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill yourself when you couldn't see.
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
The simple fact of yourself... there it is... just you... no excitement about it... a very simple fact... the only thing you have... keep it as clear as you can.
Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.
When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.
I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.
It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable... and knows no kindness with all its beauty.
I do not like the idea of happiness - it is too momentary - I would say that I was always busy and interested in something - interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.
I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.
I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.
Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower - and what is my experience if it is not the color?
I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.