Claude Monet Quotes
To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it.
I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way.
I would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.
It is difficult to stop in time because one gets carried away. But I have that strength; it is the only strength I have.
I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.
It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs - that way starvation lies.
I'm quite content: although what I'm doing is far from being as I should like, I am complemented often enough all the same.
I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.
What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.
Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.
I'm very happy, very delighted. I'm setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I'm surrounded here by all that I love.
I've only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.
The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water.
Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.
One day I am satisfied, the next day I find it all bad; still I hope that some day I will find some of them good.
What could be said about me...a man to whom only his painting matters? And of course his garden and his flowers as well.
It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.
I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.
As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.
I insist upon 'doing it alone'... I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.
What is it that's taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?
Think of me getting up before 6, I'm at work by 7 and I continue until 6.30 in the evening, standing up all the time, nine canvases. It's murderous.
I have made tremendous efforts to work in a darker register and express the sinister and tragic quality of the place, given my natural tendency to work in light and pale tones.
Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.
Eventually, my eyes were opened, and I really understood nature. I learned to love at the same time.
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.
