The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.
He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best, even when he would have preferred to do nothing at all.
There’s all the kids at home, and my mother and brother. And the men I pick up. But you live alone anyhow, don’t you? It ain’t people that count. It’s having someone you really like.
There is only a God-given number of years in which to work and fulfill yourself. Don’t squander them.
I wanted the figures to be real and believable so that you would feel that with their very next breath would begin life itself.
He had come into the autumn of his life: a man had his seasons, even as had the earth. Was the harvesting of autumn less important than the seeding of spring? Each without the other was meaningless.
He was spilling out a year of his life blood with every convulsive painting that he tore from his vitals. It was not the length of his stay on earth that mattered to him ; it was what he did with the days of his life. For him time would have to be measured by the paintings he poured out, not by the fluttering leaves of a calendar.
Because it will make a real artist of you. The more you suffer, the more grateful you ought to be. An empty stomach is better than a full one, Van Gogh, and a broken heart is better than happiness. Never forget that!
Time has a texture. Each period of waiting looms its own design. For Abigail, this one was shot through with golden threads. -Those Who Love, p. 130.
Inside yourself you’re strong. That’s the place where strength counts. Strength shows not only in how fast you can chop down trees.’ -p. 5.
I do like to teach. Sitting in my great chair at school, I used to consider myself as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth... To fire a newborn soul with ardor for learning! At that time I thought the world could afford no greater pleasure.’ – Those Who Love, p. 177.
Art is amoral; so is life.
I have to make my drawing right so that my drawing will be right.
It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.
Her gown was cut Sufficiently low to suggest how abundantly the coming generations might be nourished.
Immortality means being loved by many anonymous people.
Crime was not a cause, but a result; the prisons were the open sores of a diseased social body.
He felt extremely friendly to them all; they too knew what splendid thing it was to be in love.
Art has a magic quality: the more minds that digest it, the longer it lives.
Never let it happen to you as it did to me. That you wake in the morning, stare at the ceiling, ask yourself, ‘What have I got to get up for today?’ and answer... ‘Nothing.
A work of art meant growth from the particular to the universal. To a work of art, time brought timelessness.