Kenneth Clark Quotes

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny.

I always think that art is a form of sacrifice.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

Curiosity kills itself; and love is only curiosity, as is proved by its end.

In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

In the end you become part of everything you hate, basically.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

I feel I must live alone, alone, alone - with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.

He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

I do not often attack the Labour Party, they do it so well themselves.

Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no-one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.

Hate won't only destroy us. It will destroy these people that's hating as well.

When you get to the end will God say, "Well done," or, "What was up with that?"

Do nothing till thou hast well considered the end of it.

In the end, I worry that my arrogance shall destroy us all.