Marlene Dumas Quotes

Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

I've found you don't have to make anything up. Reality is so complex and fascinating and horrible and beautiful.

I want to tell stories that are true and that resonate and move people, that highlight both the tremendous beauty and ugliness available in the human experience.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

Life is a dream even in its most painful moments, it's a dream that we can dance to.

Photography is nothing-it's life that interests me.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

I used to believe my art had to be about the things that brought me joy and gave me hope. But I learned that art can be found in all of life, even in pain.

I think life is perverse. It can be beautiful, but it won't.

If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain.

You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.

Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

To perceive is to suffer.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

It was good, it was bad. But it was real, and that's all you have.

I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.