WINSLOW HOMER

The sun will not rise or set without my notice, and thanks.

You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors.

A man is known by his works. That I have heard at many a funeral.

I decide to go direct to Key West... I know the place quite well, and it's near the points in Florida that I wish to visit. I have an idea at present of doing some work but do not know how long that will last.

Anything written or printed under a print or picture takes the attention from it and, if it is very black or white in any marked degree, will utterly destroy its beauty.

Do not think that I have stopped painting, for at any moment, I am liable to paint a good picture.

I wouldn't go across the street to see a Bouguereau. His pictures look false; he does not get the truth of what he wishes to represent. His light is not outdoor light; his works are waxy and artificial. They are extremely near being frauds.

Talent! There's no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way.

It is certainly a most tremendous and unprecedented honor and distinction that I have received from Pittsburgh. Let us hope that it is not too late in my case to be of value to American art in something that I may yet possibly do from this encouragement.

The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life: the sun will not rise, or set, without my notice and thanks.

Every condition must be favorable, or I do not work and will not.

You can't get along without a knowledge of the principles and rules governing the influence of one color upon another. A mechanic might as well try to get along without tools.

The slavery at Bufford's was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any.

If a man wants to be an artist, he must never look at pictures.

Mr. C. Klackner has for sale four etchings etched by myself, at the expense of two years' time & hard work - 'The Life Line,' 'Peril on the Sea,' 'Eight Bells,' 'Mending Tears,' - all of which are very good and should have been put forward long ago, but C. Klackner is waiting for me to die, is my idea of the matter.

When will you learn that the time to buy a thing is when you find what you want? If you go back the next year and try to get more, they will try to sell you something else.

I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors.

This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.

With the duckets that I now have safe, I think I will retire at 66 years of age, praise God, in good health.

I don't want a lot of people nosing round my studio and bothering me. I don't want to see them at all. Let the dealers have all that bother.

Only once in the last thirty years have I made a duplicate, and that was a watercolor from my oil picture now owned by the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee, called 'Hark! the Lark.'

I do not care to put out any ideas for pictures. They are too valuable and can be appropriated by any art student, defrauding me out of a possible picture.

I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors. The thing is done without your knowing it.

Oh what a friend chance can be — when it chooses.

You have the sky overhead giving one light; then the reflected light from whatever reflects; then the direct light of the sun; so that, in the blending and suffusing of these several luminations, there is no such thing as a line to be seen anywhere.