Irving Stone Quotes

You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important.

When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.

We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.

There's no love without pain.

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?

How can a young person learn whether he chose the correct way? He thinks he has a special idea, and then he discovers that he is completely inappropriate for it.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved. [Vincent Van Gogh]

The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.

There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before.

There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action.

Reading is a stout-hearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slam-dunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.

Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-it-ness.

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]

He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.

All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.

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

Religion will never show the way.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

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

I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itelf with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.

Our secret thoughts - do they ever show up? The small flame of our soul can be burning hot, but no one comes to its warmth. Passersby see only a small whiff going through the chimney. Don't we need to take care of that flame, cherish it and patiently wait until someone will come and sit at it, do we?

Loneliness is a kind of prison. [Vincent Van Gogh]

How difficult it is to be simple.

To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.

The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.

Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only - he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

He who loves lives, he who lives works, and he who works has bread.

One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.

No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.

Life's not so bad after all. There are not only poison but also antidotes.

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.

After all, the world is still great.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

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.

Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.

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.

Story writers say that love is concerned only with young people, and the excitement and glamour of romance end at the altar. How blind they are. The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.

You cannot be the good all the time — sometimes it is necessary to get angry. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

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