LEONORA CARRINGTON

Sentimentality is a form of fatigue.

What would anyone want to write about me for? I'm just an old lady.

I do miss England. Well, I miss the idea of England, I think. But I haven't been back for years. I probably just miss the past.

Everyone's had an interesting life. Unless they're interested in business or something.

You don't decide to paint. It's like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It's a need, not a choice.

In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world's stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.

I never thought of myself as a Surrealist. I didn't think of myself as anything. I try not to. We all have these egos.

I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.

I hated being in a convent. It's another form of power. Manipulation. Because who can say - one God for the whole universe? I think there must be millions of gods! And they're not all of them very nice.

I have always thought - and a lot of people won't agree with this - that we're incredibly driven by fear, basically. Aren't we? It's awful to be frightened. I think it's a very strong, very powerful thing, fear.

I suppose what I believe in is peaceful anarchy.

One is born, one lives, one dies. What death is, I don't know.

I didn't have time to be anybody's muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.

I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.

I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being.

[At age 92:] There are places I'd like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I'm trying to understand. And I've understood nothing.

There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I won a helicopter in a crossword puzzle competition? There is not much hope though I am afraid, as they never give such practical prizes.

One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever.

I warn you, I refuse to be an object.

We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.

Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds

The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.