How difficult it is to be simple.
Fortune is beastly – it is only suitable for cows and businessmen.
I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn’t I would never write anything else.
Morality is similar to religion – it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.
Religion will never show the way.
God did not create us to abandon us.
Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion.
The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.
The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.
You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important.
An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.
Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God’s universe can be found in the human figure. A man’s body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?
Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.
Drawing is the poet’s written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.
Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.
Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people’s successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.
Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.
Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind.
Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.
Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only – he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.