163 Quotes by Irving Stone

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

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?

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

The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.

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

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

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.

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

From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, "Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.