“When you paint late at night, drinking beer or wine or both, you gotta be very careful to watch what you are doing...”
“Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.”
“My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you ve never seen it.”
“[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?] Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.”
“I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I ve become a whore for my craft.”
“A good artist should laugh often!”
“There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a home. That is what most of you will be doing anyway. We read these because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them, in their problems. And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves…”
“The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.”
“Be an artist; you can get away with anything.”
“You are the artist, and your days the canvas. Will you create an original masterpiece, or live a paint-by-numbers kind of life?”
“If you wish to break with tradition, learn your craft well, and embrace adversity”
“It s not what you look at that matters, It s what you see”
“A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I m going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase I love you, it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce s Ulysses. -James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz”
“Artists show us what we blind to.” Baris Gencel”
“Don t be an artist. Be somebody s artist.”
“Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, It is the trade entering his body. The art must enter the body, too.”
“Literature will save me it s the only certainty i am sure of.”