Joan Miro Quotes

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance.

As artists, we are so not in control most of the time of the content or the narrative of our characters, and sometimes writing takes a turn and it's not something we necessarily have control over. It's just a lot of random dumb luck, so when things click, you've just got to enjoy it.

Photography is an accident.

All of the very important events in my life happen by chance.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

You never know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen.

If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.

I can never predict what's going to happen.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

Some things happen without you putting an effort, while some others things do not happen despite we wanting it to happen.

The very formal, beautiful, composed order that I make with paint and color is freighted with objects, but like leaves falling from a tree onto a lawnmower below, the edges of this 'thing' have a certain serendipity.

One never can plan. I just did my work and enjoyed shooting for all my films.

The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

Much in our lives is chance.

I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.

Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

Life is a chance, a story is a chance. That I am here is a chance.