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All my work is about waking the dead. Self-plagiarism is style. Everybody is original. Everybody can design—if not supremely, at least beautifully. An uninformed public in a democracy is a sure-fire way to end up with little or no democracy at all. Good swiping is an art in itself. It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work—the night watchman. In a painting I want to say something comforting. Art is the lie that makes us realize the
truth. | ||
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God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it—from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do. It's one of those wonderful contradictions—if you can think, “I'm not having any abstract thoughts,” then you're having one. To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow... the coup de grâce for the painter as well as for the picture. They always say that time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. The defining function of the artist is to cherish
consciousness. Life is what you make it. Always was. Always will be. I think the universe has a finely tuned sense of humor. Vegetables are more serious than men and more sensitive to
frost. | ||
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Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind. There is only one difference between a madman and me.
I am not mad. Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies
imagination, the only thing that protects our
freedom, despite the fact that
people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether. The length of a film should be directly related to the
endurance of the human bladder. Every child is an artist.
The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up. If someone were to prove to me right this minute that
God, in all his
luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behaviour. The best way to know God is to love many
things. Genius is infinite painstaking. If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint. The human race built most nobly when the limitations were greatest; therefore when most is required of imagination to build it all. | ||
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I am still learning. A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places. We have very few inferior people in the world. We have lots of inferior environments. Try to enrich your environment. What we need are strong, straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Color weakens! Creation is a drug I can't do without. It's hard to have a brain in your head, keep your eyes open to the culture, and not be cynical. Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other
twenty-two in dreams. The people who make art their business are mostly imposters. | ||
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I do not seek. I find. Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. I admire those painters who make the
mistake of imitating the famous masterpieces of nature. Isn't it this
perpetual mania of imitation that prevents man
from being a god? Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too? If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence. Art is a collaboration between God and the
artist, and the less the artist does the better. A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. There is no solution because there is no problem. You never change things by fighting the existing
reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. A genius is only that one who discerns the pattern amidst
the confusion of details just a little bit sooner than the average man. | ||
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The talent that can be learnt turns the poet into an ironmonger. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. I am always at work, but not in order to arrive at that finish which arouses the admiration of idiots. Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. That painter who has no doubts will achieve nothing. A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude. | ||
Quote of the Moment | ||