163 Quotes by Irving Stone

He made his colours, built his stretchers, plastered his canvas, painted his pictures, carpentered his frames, and painted them. ‘Too bad I can’t buy my own pictures,’ he murmured aloud. ‘Then I’d be completely self-sufficient.’

Who loves – lives, who lives – works, and who works has some bread.

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.

I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn’t I would never write anything else.

I have to make my drawing right so that my drawing will be right.

I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I’m writing about.

It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.

Art destroys the life.

Time has a texture. Each period of waiting looms its own design. For Abigail, this one was shot through with golden threads. -Those Who Love, p. 130.