In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers.
You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can’t make a living.
Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.
I’ll do something, get into some kind of work where talk don’t count. Maybe I’ll just be a mechanic in a shop. I don’t know. I guess I don’t care much. I just want to work and keep quiet. That’s all I’ve got in mind.
If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words.
Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Don’t be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern – the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.
There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.
People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.
Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.
Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art – although it may possibly be very good journalism?
It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.
Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.
Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn’t matter so much. It’s what you feel about it, what it means to you. A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.
Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.
If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered.
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form – to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.