Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.
Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn’t such an artist, there’s no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.
My role in society – or any artist or poet’s role – is to try to express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel, not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
It’s like God’s. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.
In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.
If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
I don’t want to be the oldest performer in captivity… I don’t want to look like a little old man dancing out there.
Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.