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Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian defin...more

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I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. T...more

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Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feeli...more

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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

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He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. ...more

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But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

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Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more a...more

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You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their plac...more

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It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, cou...more