The artist's personality must be left in his dressing-room; his soul must be denuded of its own sensations and clothed with the ba...se or noble qualities he is called upon to exhibit.... [he] must leave behind him the cares and vexations of life, throw aside his personality for several hours, and move in the dream of another life, forgetting everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artis...t's work ever produced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fa...ct of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think--and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented ...to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself fe...lt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he become...s historical. He acts from or upon other artists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, w...hen a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that the ...artist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An artist's originality is balanced by a corresponding conservatism, a superstitiousness, about it; which might be boiled down to ..."What worked before will work again."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »