"Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time."
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Quote collection
Pablo Picasso quotes (page 17 of 22)
437 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art."
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"I've reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself."
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"An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work."
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"A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints."
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"What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements."
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"I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions."
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"When you're really young, you're young for life."
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"It's not what the artist does that counts; it's what he is."
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"You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him."
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"You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it."
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"If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?"
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"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
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"To model an object is to possess it."
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"Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand."
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"If I were to sign it now, I'd be committing forgery. I'd be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922."
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"You can't run a without taking risks."
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"I don't think I'm wrong when I say that the most beautiful objects of the "stone age" were made of skin, fabric, and especially wood. The "stone age" ought to be called the "wood age." How many African statues are made of stone, bone, or ivory? Maybe one in a thousand! And prehistoric man had no more ivory at his disposal than African tribes. Maybe even less. He must have had thousands of wooden fetishes, all gone now."
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"This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax."
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"Races and religions may have changed, but the marketplace, the living quarters, pilgrimage sites, places of worship, have remained the same. Venus is replaced by the Virgin, but the same life goes on."
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