Henry James Quotes

Draw what you see.

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There's no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

With sculpting, nothing is cloudy or mystical. It's just about this object, and if you're trying to depict reality, and you do it well, then the outcome is the truth.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

Sometimes art imitates life.

Everything that you can imagine is going on is going on.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

I'm not interested in making 'black' movies. I'm interested in making movies that reflect reality as I perceive it.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

The point of departure must always be a vision of the truth. The eye is the route of the soul, and the pencil or brush must sincerely and naïvely reproduce what it sees.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe.

If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.