Peter Saul Quotes

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

I have the '77 Million Paintings' running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll look up from what I'm doing and I think, 'God, I've never seen anything like that before!' And that's a real thrill.

I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.

Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects.

I love creating images, of course, because I'm an artist.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.

I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

Photographers have always been each other's biggest fans.

I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

It's not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.

Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

I don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.