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Henry Miller

Henry Valentine Miller (26 December 1891 – 7 June 1980) was an American writer and artist. He was known for developing a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism.

Quotes

 * The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.
 * Sunday after the War (1944), pub. New Directions.

 * Real awareness comes intermittently, in brief flashes of a second’s duration. The man who can hold it for a minute, relatively speaking, inevitably changes the whole trend of the world. In the span of ten or twenty thousand years a few widely isolated individuals have striven to break the deadlock, shatter the trance, as it were. Their efforts, if we look at the present state of the world superficially, seem to have been ineffectual. And yet the example which their lives afford us points conclusively to one thing, that the real drama of men on earth is concerned with Reality, and not with the creation of civilizations which permit the great mass of men to snore more or less blissfully. A man who wanted to live would not waste even a fraction of a moment in the invention, creation and perpetuation of instruments of death.
 * "Reunion in Brooklyn",Sunday after the War (1944)

 * Men are more or less reconciled to the thought of death, but they also know that it is not necessary to kill one another. They know it intermittently, just as they know other things which they conveniently proceed to forget where there is danger of having their sleep disturbed. To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in. But man refuses to stay awake because if he did, he would be obliged to become something other than he now is, and the thought of that is apparently too painful for him to endure. If man were to come to grips with his real nature, if he were to discover his real heritage, he would become so exalted, or else so frightened, that he would find it impossible to go to sleep again. To live would be a perpetual challenge to create. But the very thought of a possible, swift and endless metamorphosis terrifies him. He sleeps now, not comfortably to be sure, but certainly more and more obstinately, in the womb of a creation whose only need of verification is his own awakening.
 * "Reunion in Brooklyn", Sunday after the War (1944)

 * Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
 * Interview (1961)

 * She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known - one who can truly be called a "devoted" soul. I owe her everything.
 * Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1975)

 * A guy who's always interested in the condition of the world, and changing it, either has no problems of his own, or refuses to face them... not wanting to face things of his own nature.
 * Reds (1981)

Tropic of Cancer (1934)

 * This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.
 * Chapter One

 * I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
 * Chapter One

 * There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.
 * Chapter One

 * Well, I'll take these pages and move on. Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death.
 * Chapter One

 * For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.
 * Chapter Two

 * It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil; one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk,. Vienna is never more Vienna than Paris. Everything is raised to its apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their place. You can real here on the walls Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here. ..
 * Chapter Two

 * "I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he exited!"
 * Chapter Four, Pappin

 * Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was your corpse.
 * Chapter Four

Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

 * To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
 * London: Harper Perennial (2005), p. 108

 * Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
 * New York: Grove Press (1961), p. 170

 * Take a good look at me. Now tell me, do you think I'm the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he's dead?
 * New York: Grove Press (1961), p. 313

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

 * New York: New Directions (1958)

 * He saw the humorous aspect of everything, which is the real test of the tragic sense.
 * Part 1, p. 29
 * "He" is Miller's friend George Katsimbalis, the "Colossus" of the book's title.

 * What an astounding thing is the voice! By what miracle is the hot magma of the earth transformed into that which we call speech? If out of clay such an abstract medium as words can be shaped what is to hinder us from leaving our bodies at will and taking up our abode on other planets or between the planets? What is to prevent us from rearranging all life, atomic, molecular, corporeal, stellar, diving? Who or what is powerful enough to eradicate this miraculous leaven which we bear within us like a seed and which, after we have embraced in our mind all the universe, is nothing more than a seed — since to say universe is as easy as to say seed, and we have yet to say greater things, things beyond saying, things limitless and inconceivable, things which no trick of language can encompass.
 * Part 1, p. 73

 * To be free, as I then knew myself to be, is to realize that all conquest is vain, even the conquest of self, which is the last act of egotism. To be joyous is to carry the ego to its last summit and to deliver it triumphantly. To know peace is total: it is the moment after, when the surrenderer is complete, when there is no longer even the consciousness of surrender. Peace is at the centre and when it is attainded the voice issues forth in praise and benediction. Then the voice carries far and wide, to the outermost limits of the universe. Then it heals, because it brings light and the warmth of compassion.
 * Part 1, p. 80

 * One feels that [in Knossos, c. 1500 B.C.] man […] was religious in the only way which is becoming to man, by making the most of everything that comes to hand, by extracting the utmost of life from every passing minute.
 * Part 2, pp. 121–2

 * I'm crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs.
 * Part 2, p. 133

 * There ain't no such thing as civilization.
 * Part 2, p. 144

 * If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
 * Part 3, p. 235

The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)

 * New York: New Directions (1941)

 * [T]he aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
 * "Creative Death", p. 2
 * A fragment of Miller's unfinished book on D. H. Lawrence, originally published in the London literary journal Purpose.

 * Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
 * "Creative Death", p. 5

 * Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of it is not my concern.
 * "Reflections on Writing", p. 22

 * The real leader has no need to lead—he is content to point the way.
 * "The Wisdom of the Heart", p. 46

 * It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
 * "Raimu", p. 49

 * All about us we see a world in revolt; but revolt is negative, a mere finishing-off process. In the midst of destruction we carry with us also our creation, our hopes, our strength, our urge to be fulfilled. The climate changes as the wheel turns, and what is true for the sidereal world is true for man. The last two thousand years have brought about a duality in man such as he never experienced before, and yet the man who dominates this whole period was one who stood for wholeness, one who proclaimed the Holy Ghost. No life in the whole history of man has been so misinterpreted, so woefully misunderstood as Christ's. If not a single Man has shown himself capable of following the example of Christ, and doubtless none ever will for we shall no longer have need of Christs, nevertheless this one profound example has altered our climate. Unconsciously we are moving into a new realm of being; what we have brought to perfection, in our zeal to escape the true reality, is a complete arsenal of destruction; when we have rid ourselves of the suicidal mania for a beyond we shall begin the life of here and now which is reality and which is sufficient unto itself. We shall have no need for art or religion because we shall be in ourselves a work of art. This is how I interpret realistically what Gutkind has set forth philosophically; this is the way in which man will overcome his broken state. If my statements are not precisely in accord with the text of Gutkind's thesis, I nevertheless am thoroughly in accord with Gutkind and his view of things. I have felt it my duty not only to set forth his doctrine, but to launch it, and in launching it to augment it, activate it. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. I am one man who can truly say that he has understood and acted upon this profound thought of Gutkind's—“the stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do."
 * "The Absolute Collective", pp. 92–93
 * An essay first published in The Criterion on The Absolute Collective: A Philosophical Attempt to Overcome Our Broken State by Erich Gutkind, as translated by Marjorie Gabain.

 * Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
 * "The Enormous Womb", p. 96

 * No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
 * "The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium", p. 122

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)

 * New York: New Directions (1945)

 * We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
 * "The Shadows", p. 109

 * [T]he blind lead the blind, it's the democratic way.
 * "With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert", p. 166

 * The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
 * "With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert", p. 172

The Rosy Crucifixion I: Sexus (1949)

 * New York: Grove Press (1965)

 * A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....
 * Ch. 1, pp. 17–18

 * We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.
 * Ch. 6, p. 138

 * The man who is forever disturbed about the problems of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
 * Ch. 9, p. 205

 * Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.
 * Ch. 9, p. 213

 * The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
 * Ch. 14, p. 339

 * Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
 * Ch. 14, p. 341

 * Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation.[…] The other eight are unimportant.
 * Ch. 21, p. 465

The Books in My Life (1952)

 * Second edition. New York: New Directions (1969)

 * In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest.
 * Preface, p. 12

 * A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum—of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book is not only a friend. It makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
 * Chapter 1: "They Were Alive and They Spoke to Me", p. 23

 * If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.
 * Chapter 11: "The Story of My Heart", p. 192

The Rosy Crucifixion II: Plexus (1953)

 * New York: Grove Press (1965)

 * Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.
 * p. 53

 * My hunger and curiosity drive me forward in all directions at once.
 * p. 61

 * I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.
 * p. 599

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)

 * New York: New Directions (1957)

 * Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look."
 * p. 6

 * One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
 * p. 25
 * Often misquoted as "One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things".

 * The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.
 * p. 28

 * It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'amen.'
 * p. 32

 * There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.
 * p. 351

 * Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
 * p. 400

The Rosy Crucifixion III: Nexus (1960)

 * New York: Grove Press (1965)

 * When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide. Or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.
 * Ch. 3, p. 36

 * The Bible is full of miracles, and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike. But the miracle which every one is permitted to experience some time in his life, the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will, the miracle which is open to the fool and the coward as well as the hero and the saint, is love. Born of an instant, it lives eternally. If energy is imperishable, how much more so is love! Like energy, which is still a complete enigma, love is always there, always on tap. Man has never created an ounce of energy, nor did he create love. Love and energy have always been, always will be. Perhaps in essence they are one and the same. Why not? Perhaps this mysterious energy which is identified with the life of the universe, which is God in action, as some one has said, perhaps this secret, all-invasive force is but the manifestation of love.
 * Ch. 3, p. 40

 * In the literature of utter desolation there is always and only one symbol (which may be expressed mathematically as well as spiritually) about which everything turns: minus love. For life can be lived, and usually is lived, on the minus side rather than the plus. Men may strive forever, and hopelessly, once they have elected to rule love out. That high unfathomable ache of emptiness into which all creation might be poured and still it would be emptiness, this aching for God, as it has been called, what is it if not a description of the soul's loveless state?
 * Ch. 3, p. 41

 * What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.
 * Ch. 8, p. 129

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

 * Henry Miller on Writing: Selected by Thomas H. Moore from the Published and Unpublished Works of Henry Miller, New York: New Directions (1964)

 * Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep.
 * p. 5

 * The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.
 * p. 8

 * I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and pillage.
 * p. 10

 * To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth.
 * p. 17

 * I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write.
 * p. 19

 * Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.
 * p. 20

 * The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
 * p. 22

 * Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
 * p. 23

 * The happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphasized through their accomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live and enjoy.
 * p. 32

 * The battle is endless. It had no beginning, nor will it know an end. We who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity.
 * p. 78

 * Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.
 * p. 97

 * The whole damned universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed.
 * p. 99

 * I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo.
 * p. 101

 * I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.
 * p. 104

 * Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.
 * p. 104

 * Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
 * p. 110

 * The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.
 * p. 110

My Bike & Other Friends (1977)

 * Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti.
 * p. 12

Reflections (1981)

 * Emma Goldman. I had nothing but admiration for her. Those speeches she made on behalf of the working man, Jesus! She could inflame you, incite you to riot, [-] Goldman and Berkman, decided to assassinate the head of a big steel company, an industrial magnate named Frick. Well, they decided a gun would be the quickest and most efficient way, but they had the problem of not having enough money to buy one. So, Goldman thinks she'll have to prostitute herself to get the money. She dresses up and fixes herself up in a horrible way. She had no sense whatever in that regard. She stations herself on the street, waiting for customers, and all the while she's looking hideous, monstrous. The first man who approaches her is a gentleman, well dressed, well educated and the like. She tells him everything, all about her work, her beliefs, and even about the assassination plot. The man was completely intrigued with her stories, he wasn't at all interested in fucking her. He handed her a good sum of money [-] Needless to say, she had a profound effect on the lives of nearly everyone who came into contact with her. She was an exceptional figure.

 * The Gnostics thought the planet Earth was a cosmic mistake. I too feel that way — I'm through with this Earth before I've even departed from it.

 * One day, during one of their sessions, Gurdjieff tells Peters to look out the window and describe what he sees. 'An oak tree' the child answers. 'And what do you see on the oak tree?' 'Acorns' Peters replies. 'How many of these acorns do you suppose will become trees?' Fritz Peters is stumped, [-] 'Maybe five or six?' 'No' retorts Gurdjieff. 'Only one will become a tree, perhaps, none! Nature is always very giving, but it only gives possibility. It takes hard work and great effort to become a tree or a genuine man.'

 * I venerate van Gogh. He was a remarkable human being, a man who knew about love. His work reflects a spirit filled with light, even though his life was a tragedy in many ways.

 * Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation.

 * There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds,fish,animals,insects,trees,grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life."

 * The pygmies are one of the most cultured peoples on the face of the earth. They live a wonderful life, a life of purity. Not only are they busy and productive, they're happy and healthy as well. If we puny Americans had to live under their conditions, we'd perish in a day. Modern man has much to learn from the people he calls 'savages'. Before we are down to the last blade of grass it would be wise to study the life of the Pygmies. The secret of our own survival rests with them, the people who know how to make the most out of very little and find complete happiness with the bare essentials.

 * I've spoken many times about the Japanese woman. I've praised her again and again. But I have to tell you that I think the Japanese man is the worst. The women are such delicate creatures and they're treated abominably by the men. The Japanese men are pigs - even worse than American men.

 * More than anything the French have a profound knowledge of the ways of life. They possess a tolerance and an acceptance of the way things are. Problems are faced with intelligence, patience, and a sense of humanity. I have more respect for them than any other nationality on the face of the earth.

 * As far as Bach is concerned, I never came close to liking him [-] My favourite composer is Scriabin -[and] his Fifth sonata, in my mind, the greatest piece of music ever written.

 * Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Yseult and in it there is a theme called Love Death theme. It is so sensual, so sexual that he was criticized for having introduced sex into music. And that was quite a few years before the appearance of Elvis Presley!

 * The man who doesn't respond to music, the man without music in his soul is not to be trusted. A man like that is cold and empty, empty to the core.

 * Through it all I learned the value of being humble to the dust, reduced to ashes. Everyone should experience that. Before you can recognize you're somebody, you have to know you're nobody. [-] The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.

 * I tell you, struggle is what is missing in the lives of most young people today. If they think I'm going to support them while they create great works of art, then they've missed the point of my work, of my life! In the process of becoming a writer or an artist one has to be willing to starve. Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation.

Quotes about

 * The important thing was that when this story (""When Women Love Men"") came out no Puerto Rican woman had ever written about sex. My story is just a little story, and it's not Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I think I was trying to go in that direction.
 * Rosario Ferré interview in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)

 * "Spontaneity incarnate" is how Anaïs Nin once described Miller.
 * Jill Werman Harris editor's note in Remembrances and Celebrations (2000)

 * Henry Miller came to me in the 70s. He said I didn’t ask to be born. He wrote in a complaining, American working class speech. He was from Williamsburg. It was ugly. It reminded me of Somerville, where I came from. He made it clear that an unprivileged American could be a writer and could have a lot to talk about. He switched constantly from speech to surrealism. That shift was important to me because an unstable self was what I had to use.
 * Eileen Myles interview quoted here

 * People say, "Well, were you a feminist?" Well, I was writing those things in the mid-fifties. I was aware of a lot of things. I mean it's not as if I was so naïve. I was not naïve. I already knew that I couldn't stand Henry Miller, for instance. Goodness, I already knew that there was a literature that was not about me, sexually.
 * 1995 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

 * (“Did you ever look for women writers, in particular, or look to find your own experience in your reading?”) No, not when I was very young. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, but I had sense enough to know that, like Henry Miller, he wasn't writing for me. That's as far as I went. I knew that these guys, even the Beats-I thought they were nice, nice to see all those boys, and nice to see all the sexual feelings, but I knew it really wasn't written for me at all. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, as that I understood certain much admired writers, like Burroughs, weren't talking to me. There was nothing to get from them. Though at the same time I did get stuff from Proust. That talked to me, but all those ballsy American heroes had nothing to say to me, though my friends thought they were just hot shit, excuse me.
 * 1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

 * You notice that some of the stuff by men that I would call certainly pornographic, Henry Miller, for instance, is taken very seriously. It’s all so obvious. When women do it, it’s silly, when men do it, it’s serious.
 * Joanna Russ Interview (2011)

 * Henry Miller belonged in kind, though not in stature, to the great odd-man-out figures of literature like Blake, Whitman and Lawrence. Despite his incoherence as artist and philosopher he made a powerful impact on his time, thanks chiefly to the assurance and the sheer headlong energy of his work, expressed with equal vehemence in his protest against contemporary civilisation and in the affirmation of his own ego. ... Born in Brooklyn, Miller went to Cornell University and then – after a succession of odd jobs – to Paris where he launched himself on the ebb tide of American expatriate writing. He was already in his forties when his first and most famous novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1934. It was not until many years later, when it came out as a paperback, that the book was banned in the United States. This made it more celebrated than ever... There were clergymen who found him religious. There were critics who judged him to be some kind of sage and even saint, Ezra Pound admired him...  As chief literary anarchist of his day, a kind of low priest celebrating the last rites of what he regarded as a doomed civilisation, it was not surprising that he became a hero of the Sixties beat generation...
 * Norman Shrapnel, Beat generation writer Henry Miller dies, The Guardian   (9 June 1980)

title: Henry Miller


text:
Wikiquote:History of Wikiquote

Wikiquote, a sister project to Wikipedia, began on June 27, 2003. It was originally temporarily hosted on the Wolof wiki, but was then moved on July 10 to the Wikipedia server.

By the end of the month, July 31st 2003, there were 172 entries, 10 confessed Wikiquotians, and 48 registered users.

One month later, on August 31st 2003, there were 339 pages, 18 confessed Wikiquotians, and 105 registered users. On August 1, 2004, there were over 300 registered users and 27 confessed Wikiquotians.

History

 * July 10, 2003 - Own subdomain: quote.wikipedia.org
 * August 25, 2003 - Own domain: wikiquote.org
 * May 19, 2004 - There were 1000 pages
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 * December, 2006 - French Wikiquote reopens.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Wikiquote:History of Wikiquote


text:
Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish artist who lived and worked in Paris for many years. Around 1906–1908 together with Georges Braque Picasso initiated cubism, based on a strong inspiration of Paul Cézanne's work.

Quotes

1920s

 * Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons... [Paris 1923].
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311

 * When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes... [Paris 1923].
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311

 * They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. Velasquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from what he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velasquez painted... [Paris 1923].
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 312

"Picasso Speaks" (1923)

 * "Picasso Speaks" in The Arts, vol. 3, ed. Marius de Zayas, New York, May 1923. pp. 315-329; Reprinted in Alfred Barr: Picasso, New York 1946, pp. 270–1

 * I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.
 * p. 315

 * We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.
 * p. 315.

 * Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?
 * p. 319.

 * Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.
 * p. 391.

 * Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it. Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life. A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form.
 * p. 323.

'The Arts', New York, May 1923
As quoted by Marius de Zayas, in 'The Arts', New York, May 1923

 * Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and what not have been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.

 * The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.

 * And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic point of view of life. (Paris 1923)

 * I also often hear the word 'evolution'. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression. (Paris 1923)

 * I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in my paintings. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them. I have never made trials nor experiments. Whenever I had something to say I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression. (Paris 1923)

1930s

 * The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
 * Quote, attributed to Picasso in: Jean Cocteau (1932), Opium: The Diary of an Addict. p. 63

 * When I went to Trocadéro it was disgusting. ...The smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But... I stayed. ...I understood something very important... was happening to me... The masks... were magical things. ...The Negroes' sculptures were intercessors... Against everything; against unknown threatening spirits. I kept looking at the fetishes. I understood: I too am against everything. I too think everything is unknown, is the enemy! Everything! ...I understood ...the purpose ...all the fetishes were ...weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits, to become independent. Tools. If we give form to the spirits, we become independent of them. The spirits, the unconscious... emotion, it's the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with the masks, the redskin dolls, the dusty mannequins.  must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms: but because it was my first canvas of —yes, absolutely!
 * Interview with André Malraux (1937) describing a 1907 experience in the Palais du Trocadéro ethnographic museum, as quoted by Jean-Louis Paudrat, "From Africa", Primitivism and 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984) ed., William Ruben, Vol. 1, p. 141; and "Discovery of African Art 1906-7", Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (2003) ed. Jack Flam, Miriam Deutch, p.34; and in Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Their Friendship (2003) by Jack Flam, p. 34.

 * It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.
 * Picasso (1937), quote in: William Rowlandson (2007), Reading Lezama's Paradiso. p. 115.
 * Reply by Picasso when he was asked to explain the symbolism in the Guernica.

 * ...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
 * Paul Jones (2011), The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities. p. 47.
 * Other explanation by Picasso of the Guernica.

 * But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesn't change, that the first 'vision' remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a painting; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]
 * Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 313

"Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

 * Interview with in: "Conversation avec Picasso," in Cahiers d'Art, Vol X, 7-10, (1935), p. 173-178. Translated in: Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art.  1946, and republished in: Herschel Browning Chip (1968), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. (1968), p. 266-273'; also quoted in: Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the Great Artists – From Blake to Pollock -'', Thames and Hudson, London, 1963. (transl. Daphne Woodward).

 * It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit!
 * Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267).
 * (another and longer version:) What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my paintings. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another
 * Richard Friendenthal (1963, p. 256).

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
 * In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else
 * Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267)
 * Other translation:
 * Richard Friedenthal (1968, p. 256); Also quoted in: John Bowker (1988), Is anybody out there?: religions and belief in God in the contemporary world. p. 57.

 * I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].
 * Richard Friendenthal (1963, p. 256).

 * It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact (Boisgeloup, winter 1934).
 * Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 256).

There is no abstract art. You always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality. Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.. .Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance. In my paintings of Dinard, as in my paintings of Purville, I have given expression to more or less the same vision.. .. You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only (Boisgeloup, winter 1934).
 * Abstract art is only painting. What about drama?
 * Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 270).
 * Other translation:
 * Richard Friedenthal (1968, p. 256-7).
 * Longer version:
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 313

 * Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affects us more or less intensely. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].
 * Richard Friedenthal, (1963, pp. 257-258).

 * Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]
 * Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 258)

 * It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me if he had lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he had painted had been ten times more beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne, the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].
 * Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 259)

 * How can you expect a beholder to experience my picture as I experienced it? A picture comes to me a long time beforehand; who knows how long a time beforehand, I sensed, saw, and painted it and yet the next day even I do not understand what I have done. How can anyone penetrate my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thought, which have taken a long time to fashion themselves and come to the surface, above all to grasp what I put there, perhaps involuntary.
 * Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 260).

 * I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.
 * Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271).

 * Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived... The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.
 * Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271), quoted in Chipp (1978, 266); As cited in: Constance Milbrath (1998), Patterns of Artistic Development in Children, p. 257.

 * When we did Cubist paintings [Picasso and Georges Braque, in their early Cubist period in Paris], our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets [a.o. Appolinaire and Cendral] followed our endeavor attentively but they never dictated it to us. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].
 * Quote of Picasso in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008

 * Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein, overjoyed, told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still life!! [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008

 * The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don't believe they get anything at all. They've simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008

 * You don't need to show them to me [the notes of the complete interview which Christian Zervos], editor of 'Cahiers d'Art' showed Picasso after their conversations at Boisgeloup: Picasso's country place then]. The essential thing in our period of weak morale is to create enthusiasm. How many people have actually read Homer? All the same the whole world talks of him. In this way the Homeric legend is created. A legend in this sense provokes a valuable stimulus. Enthusiasm is what we need most, we and the younger generation. [Boisgeloup, 1935]
 * As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008

1940s

 * Almost every evening [in their common early-Cubist years, in Paris], either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's paintings. A canvas wasn't less both of us fear p. 311

 * Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defence against the enemy.
 * La peinture n'est pas faite pour décorer des appartements. C'est un instrument de guerre offensive et défensive contre l'ennemi.
 * La pintura no se ha inventado para adornar las habitaciones. La pintura es un arma ofensiva, en la defensa contra el enemigo.
 * Les lettres françaises (1943-03-24).

 * When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
 * As quoted in Life with Picasso, by François Gilot, 1964, p. 60

1950s

 * When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I'm not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvasses are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last thing's he's done in Vence [where Matisse painted his late frescos in the chapel] convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has. [Picasso is reacting to Chagall's daughter Ida, 1952]
 * Quote in a writing of Francoise Gilot; as quoted in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 440

 * Les gloires, les trompettes, les palmes... et les bas-reliefs,... tout cela fait un monument.
 * Translation: The glories, trumpets, palms... and low reliefs,... all that makes a monument.
 * Picasso (1952). Quoted in: Michael D. Garval (2004), "A Dream of Stone": Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-century French Literary Culture. p. 226.
 * Picasso commented on the matter of the monument destruction in Paris.

 * When I don't have red, I use blue.
 * Pablo Picasso (1953); quoted in: Kilkenny (2004), Doomsday Marauders, p. 83.

 * When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
 * after the death of Matisse (1954); as quoted in Matisse & Picasso, By Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 7

 * On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d'Avignon [drafted as a soldier for World war 1.] I never saw them again [not literally a fact, but the close relation between Picasso and Braque ended].
 * Quote in My Galleries and Painters, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, New York Viking Press, 1971, p. 46
 * Picasso in a talk c. 1955, with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

 * Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
 * Quote in Vogue, 1 November 1956.

 * There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence transform a yellow spot into a sun.
 * In: Sergei Eisenstein (1957), Film form [and]: The film sense, p. 127.

 * On met très longtemps à devenir jeune.
 * It takes a very long time to become young.
 * As quoted by Jean Cocteau The Hand of a Stranger (Journal d'un Inconnu). Horizon Press. 1959 [1953].

1960s

 * Even the signature of Kodra is a work of art.
 * Repubblica, 2006
 * La Provincia'', 2006

 * The artist is a receptacle for emotions derived from anywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing figure, from a spider’s web. This is a spider's web. This is why one must not make a distinction between things. For them there are no aristocratic quarterings. One must take things where one finds them.
 * Quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 258 (translation Daphne Woodward)

 * L'art n'est pas chaste [...], on devrait l’interdire aux ignorants innocents, ne jamais mettre en contact avec lui ceux qui y sont insuffisamment préparés. Oui, l'art est dangereux. Ou s'il est chaste, ce n'est pas de l'art.
 * Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.
 * Quote by Antonina Vallentin (1963 [1957]), Picasso, p. 168.

 * [Speaking of computers] But they are useless. They can only give you answers.
 * As discussed in this entry from Quote Investigator, the origin seems to be the article "Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview" by William Fifield which appeared in The Paris Review 32, Summer-Fall 1964, and collected a number of interviews Fifield had done with Picasso.
 * Common later variant: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." This variant seems to have arisen in the 1980s, the earliest known appearance in a book is Herman Feshbach, "Reflections on the Microprocessor Revolution: A Physicist's Viewpoint", in Man and Technology (1983), ed. Bruce M. Adkins, where the attribution is described as "rumoured".

 * It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
 * Picasso quoted in 'TIME'; quoted in: The Atlantic, Vol. 214 (1964), p. 97.
 * Picasso commented on his ambiguous style, or use of multiple styles.

 * Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
 * Quote (1964); as quoted in Picasso and Company (trans. 1966) by Gyula Brassaï

 * You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.
 * Quote by old Picasso (1960's); as quoted in 'Matisse & Picasso', Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p 1

''Picasso's remark — "When there's anything to steal, I steal" — was fair warning to the competition. In modern art he has been, for years, the cock-of- the-walk, (The broody hens, one supposes, are also part of that picture.) But the book is valuable, primarily, for Picasso's observations about his own work and the work of others.''
 * When there's anything to steal, I steal
 * Quoted in: Thought. Vol. 17 (1965). p. 154.
 * The magazine further commented:

 * It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.
 * On the first moon landing, quoted in The New York Times (1969-07-21).

 * For me, there are two kinds of women — goddesses and doormats.
 * Quoted in: Briton Hadden, Henry Robinson Luce (1969), Time, Vol. 93. p. 66.

1970s

 * I was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.
 * Original: C’est en passant que Casagemas était mort que je me suis mis à piendre en bleu
 * Quoted in Pierre Daix, La Vie de Peintre de Pablo Picasso, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977.
 * Picasso explained his friend (around 1965), why he started painting in blue early around 1905. Picasso had made a portrait of Carles Casagemas in 1899.
 * To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of non-sequiturs. ...
 * Quoted in: Pierre Cabanne (1977), Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, p. 268.

 * Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.
 * Quoted in: The Artist, Vol. 93 (1978) p. 5.

"It was a spirited dinner and Picasso a cheerful, genial host. After the meal, while pouring wine into a friend's glass, Picasso said, Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more. A little later, about 11:30 P.M., he left his guests, saying, And now I must go back to work. He was up painting until 3:00 A.M. That morning Picasso woke at 11:30, unable to move. By 11:40 he was dead..".
 * Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more.
 * Quoted in: Scott Slater, Alec Solomita (1980), Exits: stories of dying moments & parting words. p. 8.
 * Slater & Solomita (1980) explained:

Attributed from posthumous publications

 * 1970s
 * I don't know where he [ Marc Chagall ] gets those images; he must have an angel in his head.
 * As quoted in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 33

 * 1980s
 * Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.
 * Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd

 * To find is the thing.
 * Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd

 * I do not see why so much importance should be attached to the idea of 'research' in painting.
 * Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd

 * I treat paintings as I treat objects. If a window in a picture looks wrong, I close it and draw the curtains, just as I would do in my own room.
 * Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd

 * For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.
 * Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd

 * For a long time I limited myself to one colour — as a form of discipline.
 * quoted in Picasso on Art (1988), ed. Dore Ashton
 * quote on Picasso's 'Blue' and 'Rose' periods

 * "You mustn't alway believe what I say", he once told me. "Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer."
 * From Picasso, His Life and Work, Sir Roland Penrose, (1981), p. 413

 * I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. After all, what is a painter? He is a collector who gets what he likes in others by painting them himself. This is how I begin and then it becomes something else.
 * Quoted in: Ann Livermore (1988), Artists and Aesthetics in Spain. p. 154

 * People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
 * Quoted in Picasso on Art (1988), ed. Dore Ashton.

 * Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.
 * Andre Malraux cites Picasso in: Anatoliĭ Podoksik, Marina Aleksandrovna Bessonova, Pablo Picasso (1989), Picasso: The Artists Work in Soviet Museums. p. 13.
 * Picasso talking about his discovery of African art.

 * 1990s
 * La inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarte trabajando.
 * Translation: Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
 * In: Tomás R. Villasante (1994), Las ciudades hablan: identidades y movimientos sociales en seis metrópolis latinoamericanas. p. 264.

 * People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.
 * Quoted in: Ingo F. Walther (1996), Picasso, p. 67.

 * It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
 * Quoted in: Peter Erskine, Rick Mattingly (1998), Drum Perspective, p. 73.
 * Alternative forms:
 * "At eight, I was Raphael", he used to say. "It took me a whole lifetime to paint like a child"
 * From Picasso, my grandfather, Marina Picasso (2001).

Misattributed

 * I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
 * Attributed in Civilization's Quotations : Life's Ideal (2002) by Richard Alan Krieger, p. 132, and many places on the internet, this was actually stated by Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Anthon van Rappard (18 August 1885), also rendered "I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it."
 * The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
 * Attributed by Banksy on Instagram (October 6, 2018): "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" - Picasso. This was actually written by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin in his essay "Reaction in Germany," in 1842.

Disputed

 * Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
 * Quote attributed to Picasso in TIME, October 4, 1976, Modern Living: Ozmosis in Central Park

 * Good artists copy, great artists steal.
 * Compare: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T. S. Eliot, in Philip Massinger, in The Sacred Wood (1920)

 * Yo no busco, yo encuentro.
 * I do not seek, I find.
 * Quoted in Graham Sutherland, "A Trend in English Draughtsmanship", Signature, III (1936), pp. 7-13.

 * If they took away all my paints, I'd use pastels, if they took away my pastels, I'd use crayons, if they took away my crayons, I'd use a pencil. If they put me in a cell, and stripped me of everything, I'd spit on my finger and draw on the wall.
 * The original quote attributed to Picasso in 1951 quotes him as saying that 'even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit' (see above). This expansion appears to derive from an interview given by actor Dustin Hoffman to the L.A. Times in 2001.
 * http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/04/entertainment/ca-32985
 * "No. It took me sixty years to draw that."
 * In response to a woman in a café in Spain willing to pay for a napkin Picasso drew on. Picasso is said to have responded "Sure, that will be $10.000", to which the woman responded in shock "But it only took you ten minutes to draw that.", after which Picasso responded the above.
 * How expensive is 10 minutes of your time? – mentioned in two books, one from 1984, and another one from 2016, but not verifiable.

Quotes about Picasso

 * we are not gladiators. But there is something we are committed to of fundamental importance, something everybody should be committed to. We are committed to the process of changing our position in the world. This is what our literature is about. There is a certain position assigned to me in the world, assigned to him (James Baldwin) in the world, and we are saying we are not satisfied with that position. This is important to me-to everybody. I think you see it is important to me. You may not see that it is important to you but it is. We want to create the new man. Mankind tries all kinds of ways, all kinds of solutions; some of them leading that far and no farther and it is wise that we try something else. We have followed your way and it seems there is a little problem at this point. And so we are offering a new aesthetic. There is nothing wrong with that...Picasso did that. In 1904 he saw that Western art had run out of breath so he went to the Congo-the dispised Congo-and brought out a new art. Don't mind what he was saying before he died: that much is entirely his business. But he borrowed something which saved his art. And we are telling you what we think will save your art. We think we are right, but even if we are wrong it doesn't matter. It couldn't be worse than it is now.
 * Chinua Achebe in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

 * I don't try to be prophetic, as I don't sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, "I don't look like that." And Picasso replied. "You will." And he was right.
 * Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

 * Well, I looked at Picasso (at the Picasso exhibition in New York, Museum of Modern Art in 1939) until I could smell his armpits and the cigarette smoke on his breast. Finally, in front of one picture – a bone figure on a beach – I got it. I saw that the figure was not his real subject. The plasticity wasn't either – although the plasticity was great. No. Picasso had uncovered a feverishness in himself and is painting it – a feverishness of death and beauty.
 * William Baziotes, his quote in Modern Art U.S.A., R. Blesh, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, pp. 268-69

 * At that time I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count... .We were living in Montmarte, we used to meet every day, we used to talk... In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more...  .It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together.
 * Georges Braque (1954), referring to to the early starting years of Cubism in Paris with Picasso, ca. 1907 -1910; from an interview with Dora Vallier in 1954; as quoted in Letters of the Great Artists – From Blake to Pollock (1963), Richard Friedenthal, translation: Daphne Woodward, p. 264

 * When we were so friendly with Picasso, there was a time when we had difficulty in recognizing our own pictures. Later, when the revelation went deeper, differences appeared. Revelation is the one thing that cannot be taken from you. But before the revelation took place, there was still a marked intention of carrying painting in a direction that could re-establish the bond between Picasso and ourselves.
 * Georges Braque (1954), referring to early Cubism ca. 1907 -1910 in Paris; from an interview with Dora Vallier in 1954, as quoted in Letters of the Great Artists – From Blake to Pollock (1963), Richard Friedenthal, translation: Daphne Woodward, p. 265

 * If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.
 * Georges Braque (1954), in an interview with Dora Vallier; as quoted in Letters of the Great Artists – From Blake to Pollock (1963), Richard Friedenthal, translation: Daphne Woodward, p. 265

 * The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.. ..scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.
 * Georges Braque (1957), his quote in 'The Observer', by John Richardson, 1 December 1957

 * I had this gorgeous hair and, like Coco Chanel, I used to tailor a man's shirt or jacket to fit me. I was like an iceberg. You couldn't get close to me. They didn't dare come near me, the men. That was why Picasso was intrigued [1954].. ..I was terrified he'd ask me to pose in the nude but he was very sensitive to this. He saw I didn't like myself and wanted to know why.' [she did not tell him.] That's why he painted me like that.. [The curators asked her, 'Why no mouth?:] 'Oh, I didn't speak much.'
 * Lydia Corbett, the model for Picasso's Sylvette paintings, as quoted from: Sylvette, 1954 by Picasso

 * Picasso es pintor, yo también; Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.
 * Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.
 * Salvador Dalí (attributed).

 * Outside the Fauve circle, other artists in Paris were taking new and radical approaches to art as well during 1905 and 1906. New influences were circulating in the city. For example, Andre Derain acquired a Negro mask from his friend De Vlaminck. He presented it, with special excitement to Henri Matisse and to a younger artist, Pablo Picasso. In early 1906, Picasso began his studies leading to 'Les Demoiselles d' Avignon', the first exploration of the emerging Cubist idiom.
 * Gaston Diehl. The Fauves (The Library of great art movements), September, 1975, p. 32

 * People talk of Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger.
 * Marcel Duchamp (1915), his quote from 'A complete reversal of opinions on art'; Marcel Duchamp, in 'Art and Decoration', New York, 1 September 1915

 * Picasso is taking Cézanne's elements - the cone, cylinder and sphere - into Cubism. Matisse is taking Cézanne's interest in the wholeness and the clarity of figures. They're taking almost opposite interpretations of what they see in Cézanne: Picasso is understanding it as decomposition, and Matisse is understanding it as composition.
 * John Elderfield, MoMA-curator and Matisse scholar; as quoted in 'Matisse & Picasso', Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 4

 * Because of his extraordinary technical virtuosity, Picasso was able effectively and convincingly to employ conflicting styles at will... another instance of his uncommon sensitivity to the arbitrariness of different languages. ...[H]e was probably the first Western artist to insist willfully and persistently on the relative arbitrariness of the means of pictorial representation. Indeed, this... is one of the most original and radical aspects of his entire career. Artists of the previous generation, such as Cézanne and van Gogh, had employed systematic "distortions" in their works, but... as part of a... direct way of communicating the "truth" of his own personal vision. Picasso's contemporaries, including Matisse, followed in that tradition.
 * Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Their Friendship (2003) p. 125.

 * [A]lthough the sculpture made by painters is traditionally regarded as a way of giving material presence to two-dimensional imagery, Picasso was much more concerned with dematerilization, and the possibility of creating "non-space," in both mediums. This issue was especially germane to Picasso's sculpture, and it is also a crucial element of his Painter and Model. ...Picasso ...aspired to a very different type of spatial construction, literally creating a visual "nothingness." Such ideas were no longer Cubist ...but rather were ways of creating signs not simply for things but also for paradoxes—for contradictions as well as for assertions, for states of suspension and nonbeing as well as for being.
 * Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Their Friendship (2003) pp. 142-143.

 * Picasso said, “You can have all the perspectives at once!” What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested.
 * Hannah Gadsby, quoted here

 * Picasso - never at a loss for words: 'What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet...Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it... painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.'
 * Nadine Gordimer "When Art Meets Politics" (1999)

 * I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso.
 * Arshile Gorky (1940's), as quoted in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28

 * I have in front of me photographs of all Picasso’s best works. The mere I admire them the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited! We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing.
 * Arshile Gorky (1941), in a letter to his future wife Agnes Magruder (Mougouch), 7 Mai 1941; as quoted in Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof, ed. by Matthew Spender, Ridinghouse, London 2009, p. 168

 * ...they [Picasso and Georges Braque ] began working together, each understood and accepted the perspectival ambiguity implicit in Cézanne's colored planes, which they saw as acting simultaneously in two different positions: one an illusion, a colored equivalent for the position of the natural object in depth, the other actual, as an area for color on the surface of the picture.
 * , Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880 - 1940 (1972) p. 133.

 * There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti.
 * Ollie Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Stories (1994)

 * ..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature..
 * Marsden Hartley (1912) in a letter (from Paris) to Rockwell Kent, August 22, 1912, Archives of American Art; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 42

 * Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso’s lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?
 * Katy Hessel Interview with Artnet (2023)

 * As a little female kid in Ohio, It was hard to identify with Picasso: his life with his babes And my life with my cat were rather different.
 * Jenny Holzer Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016) 87

 * even his signature is a work of art.
 * incluso su firma es una obra de arte.
 * Kodra; as cited in Addio al pittore Ibrahim Kodra l' albanese che piaceva anche a Brera, repubblica.it'', February 2, 2006

 * When he [Picasso] paints as an cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fine and the result very strong. But those who imitate him achieve nothing worthwhile.
 * Aristide Maillol (1939 – 1944) in Conversations with Judith Cladel; as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, Londonp. p. 407

Demoiselles]] [made in Paris, June-July 1907]. Matisse had shown him an African statue he'd bought. Then Picasso went to the dingy ethnographic museum in Paris, the 'Trocadero', with its collection of primitive artefacts. It smelled like a flea market, but it opened his eyes to the magic of masks and fetishes. If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them, he said. Suddenly... ''I grasped why I was a painter. All alone in that museum, surrounded by masks, Red Indian dolls, dummies covered with dust. The Demoiselles must have come that day.. ..because it was my first exorcising picture.''
 * Years later he [Picasso] would tell the French writer André Malraux of something else that shaped his [[w:Les Demoiselles d'Avignon|
 * André Malraux, 1940's, in 'Matisse & Picasso', Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 4

 * Sexuality in art, Picasso’s included, is always an effect of representation: it is produced conventionally, through pictorial signs, and never traceable directly to the artist’s feelings or fantasies about particular women or woman in general. Picasso may be unremittingly macho in his life, but in his work, with rare exceptions, as in the period in the Thirties when he was obsessed with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter, his visual construction of gender is interestingly ambiguous.
 * Linda Nochlin, in "The Vanishing Brothel", London Review of Books, 6 March 1997.

 * J. Robert Oppenheimer: [Ernest] Lawrence, you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx...
 * Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, as interpreted by Cillian Murphy

 * Picasso was one of my favorite studies.
 * Daphne Odjig Interview (2014)

 * People see Picasso's Guernica. They don't know what that is really about. Guernica was the first bombing of an entire town. The United States backed the real bastards because they were all anti-Red.
 * Tillie Olsen, https://progressive.org/magazine/tillie-olsen-interview/ Interview] with The Progressive Magazine (1999)

 * Picasso's great fresco is a monument to destruction, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius.
 * Herbert Read (1945), 'Guernica', in A Coat of Many Colours, Routledge, 1945; also quoted in Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000, and Russell Martin, Picasso's War : the destruction of Guernica, and the masterpiece that changed the world. New York : Plume Books, 2003.

 * Well some people try to pick up girls And get called assholes This never happened to Pablo Picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare and So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
 * Johnathan Richman, "Pablo Picasso" from The Modern Lovers (recorded 1972, released 1976 by Beserkley Records)

 * He's the greatest bull artist in the world—and only occasionally the greatest artist in the world.
 * Edward G. Robinson, as quoted in Leonard Spigelgass's epilogue to Robinson's All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography (1973), p. 276

 * Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear.
 * Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

 * Picasso was telling Madame C-- that he could paint anywhere and anyhow. That nothing in the world could stop him. That even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit. He said he could paint then and there if he wanted to, or if he felt like it.
 * Francis Newton Souza, "Paris Portrait - II" in

 * A friend built a modern house and he suggested that Picasso too should have one built. But, said Picasso, of course not, I want an old house.  Imagine, he said, if Michelangelo would have been pleased if someone had given him a fine piece of Renaissance furniture, not at all.
 * Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1938) [Dover, 1984, ISBN 0-486-24715-5 ], p. 31.
 * Note: Stein used the spelling "Michael Angelo" rather than "Michelangelo." The quotation preserves this spelling.

 * Picasso... the master... ...being a master: 'I don’t search, I find' ["Je ne cherche pas, je trouve"; a famous quote of Picasso, where he criticizes the 'searching' artists] ... the master, the mastery... ...Producing, producing... He [Picasso!] only knows how to work, can’t do anything else. What lost souls!... The great risk is producing for its own sake. You must never force things. You just have to wait.
 * Bram van Velde (1966), in Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, ed. Charles Juliet, First Dalkey Archive edition, 2009, London and Champaign, 31 October 1966; p. 59

 * "Almost 40 years ago [from 2006] a German official asked Pablo Picasso in front of his painting of the bombing that destroyed Guernica if he had done that. The artist replied, "No:  You all did it."
 * Horacio Verbitsky (2006) Un mundo sin periodistas (Editorial Sudamericana, p. 22).

title: Pablo Picasso