Robert W. Service Quotes

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don't know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn't responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I'm just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.

This is a fantasy fiddle tune. The part you fantasize is the fiddle.

Art does not imitate, but interpret.

Too liberal self-accusations are generally but so many traps for acquittal with applause.

When I'm old and gray, I want to have a house by the sea. And paint. With a lot of wonderful chums, good music, and booze around. And a damn good kitchen to cook in.

I don't agree with most forms of censorship, and I especially don't agree with the idea that one needs to be from the same cultural, ethnic, or religious background as the subjects they portray in order to be qualified to portray those subjects. I believe that compassion and empathy should cross all of those category barriers, and the conversations art creates can be inflammatory initially, but I think are most often constructive and healing in the long run.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

Those of you who are not aware of my brilliant career as a stand up comic, I'm not aware of it either so we might well wonder what we're doing here.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.

Life's not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.

The more people see of me, the more they'll realize that all I'm good for is making tunes.

Poets tell many lies.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

Man has the right . . . to play as he will . . . to think what he will: to speak what he will: to write what he will: to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will: to dress as he will.

My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth.

The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.

I didn't seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.