Max Beckmann Quotes

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

Art is spiritual.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

The muses visit when I'm lonely.

For me to be creative, I have to have peace.

When I'm sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.

But I'm more of a recluse when it comes down to being a writer and being a creative person rather than being a celebrity.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

To make up a dance, I still need, as I needed then, a pot of tea, walking space, privacy and an idea.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

I’ve never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view... If you’re involved with imagination and the creative process, it’s not such a difficult thing to believe in a god. But I’m not involved in any religions.

To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.

You think about the beauty and what you want to transmit. If I think about designing, I can't design.

While all the other kids were out playing ball and stuff, I used to stay in my room and imagine that there was a camera in the wall. And I used to really believe that I was putting on a television show and that it was going out to somewhere in the world.

I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.