Artist Quotes

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.

A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.

Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

I promised to have no partisan affiliation and no subsidy except advertising.

Well, I would say that I'm just drifting. Here in the pool.

Well, I want you to know how much I appreciate this. Really.

I'm going home now. I apologize for what I said. I hope you can forget it, but I'm going home right now.

The value of impermanence is to call attention to the permanent.

Yes, the first job I had at the studio was Snow White. I don't like the term particularly, but I got stuck with the human characters. They just didn't have that many people who could draw humans.

What we were in on, really, was the invention of animation.

Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.

There is something I feel when I animate something; you can never really understand the character you're animating unless you've had the opportunity to turn it around. Once you've done that, you know it is a three-dimensional object.

The first professional training I received of any kind was when I was 14 years old and we were in Kansas City, Missouri. I attended the Kansas City Art Institute for one summer.

Some of these sketches were done at the very beginning of the Pirates project, when I was trying to find a direction for myself. That was the early sixties... maybe 61 or 62.