Stanley Spencer Quotes

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

The Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Images adorn our inner life and carry great power there.

Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

I've dreamed landscapes for years, and my dreams play an enormous role in my work. In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style, and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I've done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams.

Art is spiritual.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

Art is the window to man's soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.

I've always connected with music. Life's not always what you see; it's what going on in your head. Music is what comes out of your subconscious.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It's like my friend, almost.

Art is the skin of the soul.

I never saw fairy tales as an escape or a cop-out... On the contrary, speaking for myself, it is the way to understand reality.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

I suppose for me, with 'Djesse,' I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

Introverts probably have a higher degree of sensitivity to outside stimulus and tend to back off. In your quiet shyness as a child, you end up with an accumulation of thoughts and ideas, building up big, imaginative worlds. You have to get it all out somehow, so it goes into your work.