Henry Moore Quotes

You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

Over the years I always did some water colors, and I did a series of pictures of drawings. I always did it during a period of time that was slow in the photo business, but in essence it was always frustrating because I'd get started, and then it would be time to get back to work and I wouldn't get anywhere with the painting.

When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I had a natural feeling for sculpture, and the nudes are my sculpture.

So when I looked at pictures and produced my calendar and edited the pictures, it wasn't just about looking at myself and thinking I'm attractive. I try to take myself out of it and get into the whole process of putting it all together.

Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.

And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

Once I make a picture, I never look at it again.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

Writers are always critical of themselves and I'm no exception. I always feel that maybe I could have done better.

The sculptor who deals with form seeks to imprison beauty in a marble statue that will withstand the ravages of time during millenniums; but a marble statue is cold and speaks to but a few of the most evolved who are able to infuse the statue with their own life.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?