Robert Motherwell Quotes

We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

I am really puzzled to understand myself.

The only subject I know anything about is myself and I don't know that too clearly.

It's not only the most difficult thing to know one's self, but the most inconvenient.

Most of us don't spend any time knowing ourselves. We just keep reacting.

There are times I can't even figure myself out.

Only the shallow know themselves.

I am an actor and this is holding the mirror up to nature, as it were.

For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

I find myself fascinating.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.

An artist's job is simply to take the mirror in front of your face and hold it there. It's not to give you any answers. It is simply to take that mirror and point it at you.

One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.