When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears – I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer’s block.
If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.
Art’s a staple. Like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Those who think it is a luxury have only a fragment of a mind. Man’s spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.
The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.
Reading is a stout-hearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slam-dunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.
The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.
Pain did curious things to him. It made him sensitive to the pain of others.
Do you know the anecdote about Rubens? He was serving Holland as Ambassador to Spain and used to spend the afternoon in the royal gardens before his easel. One day a jaunty member of the Spanish Court passed and remarked, ‘I see that the diplomat amuses himself sometimes with painting,’ to which Rubens replied, ‘No, the painter amuses himself sometimes with diplomacy!
The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.
I was thinking that Rembrandt would have like to paint you.
You can only have the courage and strength to do what you think is right. It may turn out to be wrong, but you will at least have done it, and that is the important thing. We must act according to the best dictates of our reason, and then leave God to judge its ultimate value.
As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.
Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life.
But we artists have to be selfish you know, after all, with each painting, we die a little.
You are a grand nerveux, Vincent,” Doctor Rey had told him. “You never have been normal. But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.
These workers,” said Mendes with a gentle sweep of his arm, “have a hard life of it. When illness comes they have no money for a doctor. The food for tomorrow comes from today’s labour, and hard labour it is, too. Their houses, as you see, are small and poor; they are never more than a stone’s throw away from privation and want. They’ve made a bad bargain with life; they need the thought of God to comfort them.
Vincent took them in the full spirit of friendship which knows that the difference between giving and taking is purely temporal.
The desire to succeed had left Vincent. He worked because he had to, because it kept him from suffering too much mentally, because it distracted his mind. He could do without a wife, a home, and children; he could do without love and friendship and health; he could do without security, comfort, and food; he could even do without God. But he could not do without something which was greater than himself, which was his life – the power and ability to create.
Sometimes I think that just as trains and carriages are means of locomotion to get us from one place to another on this earth, so typhoid and consumption are means of locomotion to get us from one world to another.
Do you call yourself an artist?” “Yes.” “How absurd. You never sold a picture in your life.” “Is that what being an artist means – selling? I thought it meant one who was always seeking without absolutely finding. I thought it means the contrary from ‘I know it, I have found it.’ When I say I am an artist, I only mean.