Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.

I have had an interest in art since childhood. I loved to draw as a child and still do.

I paint. I have been painting since I was kid. If I hadn't gone into radio when I did, I probably would have come out of the Army, gone into the art business, and probably would have flopped because I'm not that great.

I really want to continue doing art. I would love to go back to doing paintings one day.

I love to draw, although I wish I was better at it.

The boyhood dream of becoming a painter stays important to me.

I wanted to be a car pinstriper, but there was nobody to teach me how to do it. So I said, 'Music's good too. I'll do that maybe, since I can't work out how to do this pinstriping.'

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

Us visual thinkers like me, be good at things like industrial design, graphics, art, those kind of jobs.

As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts.

Art was always my thing. I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship. I'm a left-handed, right-brained, painting-drawing guy. That was always my skill.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.

In my teens I fancied myself an artist; I hung out with the eccentric art teacher at my high school, painted still lifes and portraits and landscapes in watercolor and acrylics, took private lessons, won some blue ribbons for my earnest renderings. My lack of talent did little to dampen my enthusiasm. In college I thought I'd continue, but, like Salieri, I quickly realized that while I had the ability to appreciate art, I wasn't actually very good.

I feel that if I had not had an art program in my school, I would have failed in a big way. My teachers knew I was intelligent, but they didn't quite know how I was ever going to apply that intelligence. The one or two teachers who knew me well knew that it would be through drawing or acting or whatever means of expression I was allowed.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother.

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn't know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.

One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art - and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois.

All men are creative but few are artists.

Normal people do not create art.