Irving Stone Quotes

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.

No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink.

Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.

One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.

There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action.

How difficult it is to be simple.

...and rout the magical mystical moonlight with fierce proof of its own greater power to light, to heat, to make everything known.

He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.

When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.

To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.

Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.

God did not create us to abandon us.

...that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]

The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.

Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God's universe can be found in the human figure. A man's body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.

The writer ... an athlete required to break the four-minute mile every morning.

I will be an artist. I am sure I will. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind.

Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.

All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.

Fortune is beastly - it is only suitable for cows and businessmen.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness.

Religion will never show the way.

Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.

Loneliness is a kind of prison. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Normal people do not create art.

How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

From out of pain, beauty.

Life's not so bad after all. There are not only poison but also antidotes.

His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap

It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.