Nicole Krauss Quotes

Everything does come from nature. That's where you get new ideas. Just draw the landscape. I felt doing it with a bit of burnt wood was also good because I was drawing burnt wood with a piece of wood. I wanted to do black and white. After using color, I thought black and white would be good. You can have color in black and white. There is color in them, actually.

What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

I often think the doctrine of fasting in Lent and having meatless days as old-fashioned...it might be better to give up television.

So you used to know everything?" She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars.

My picture [A Boat Passing a Lock, 1823-6] is liked at the [Royal] Academy, indeed it forms a decided feature and its light can not be put out. Because it is the light of nature - the Mother of all that is valuable in poetry - painting or anything else... my execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones - perhaps the scarifies I make for 'lightness' and 'brightness' is too much but these things are the essence of Landscape.

If you are creative, sometimes you give up a lot of things that other people have.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.

The art of art... is simplicity.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

Building is a sweet impoverishing.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.

In fact, whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hands ... it lies in his power to create them . . .

Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship.

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again. I don't worry whether the period is contemporary or three hundred years ago. Human beings are all alike. The main thing in acting is honesty, to feel the humanity and get to the essence of the character. You can't put anything into a character that you haven't got within you.

The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush.