Al Stone Quotes

What we know of others is our personal secret.

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

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

It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

Do not call yourself old. A man is as old as the creative force within him.

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.

After all, the world is still great.

An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.

There's no love without pain.

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

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

Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion.

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

From out of pain, beauty.

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

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?

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.

The writer ... an athlete required to break the four-minute mile every morning.

Sometimes men are generous and forgiving, sometimes angry and blind.

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

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

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

Religion will never show the way.

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.

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

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.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

Normal people do not create art.

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

Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.

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

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

Opinion is the death of knowledge.

Trauma reflected upon in tranquility can produce morally stunning insights - literary light! It can also produce maudlin rubbish.

All media can muddy the mind. Language leads to literature. It also leads to dogma.

Writing, as I experience it, means wringing out the heart/mind until it stops lying.

it takes a lot of rehearsal to become yourself.

writers who go outside the lines when they draw pictures of the world are seldom rewarded for their efforts.

Love, like alcoholism, comes to a point of no return.

I'm accused of cleverness as if it were a sin. She is merely clever, they say.

I love any kind of acting, so if I could focus on becoming the best actor I can strictly on my voice, I would love that.

I don't think a person should take herself seriously unless she is alone.

TV shapes thought as surely as language shapes it.

Love is all there's time for.

Misogyny is the death of the heart.

As art reveals the artist more than the world, so you see yourself and what you are not in the mirror of another culture.

... romance is unsatisfactory as a religion. It is no use looking for the infinite in the eyes of another.

There are only two kinds of pain: too much love or too little.

Just as a salesperson is never extreme or original or overdressed, so the TV retailers never do anything to distract their audiences from the real product, the commercial.