Alice Neel Quotes

#1. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

Amy Bloom

#2. When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was ... I thought art is art.

Alice Neel

#3. The seed of revolution is repression.

Woodrow Wilson

#4. Oh, Lady Maccon, I am unreservedly in love with her. That black hair, that sweet disposition, those capital hats.

Gail Carriger

#5. Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York.

Alice Neel

#6. You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is ... unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.

Alice Neel

#7. I know all the theory of everything but when I paint I don't think of anything except the subject and me.

Alice Neel

#8. If you're sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.

Alice Neel

#9. When women finally get liberated, they'll do the same that men do
dog eat dog
that's what our culture is ... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.

Alice Neel

#10. It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint.

Alice Neel

#11. The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it.

Alice Neel

#12. Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.

Alice Neel

#13. All experience is great providing you live through it.
If it kills you, you've gone too far.

Alice Neel

#14. Don't listen to the prevailing majority points of view. If you have new ideas, push them.

Leroy Hood

#15. Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

Alice Neel

#16. Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it.

Alice Neel

#17. I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct ... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation.

Alice Neel

#18. You can turn your weaknesses into strengths.

Ken Petti

#19. You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything.

Alice Neel

#20. I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.

Alice Neel

#21. I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.

Alice Neel

#22. You know it's very hard to maintain a theory in the face of life that comes crashing about you.

Alice Neel

#23. Lucky for me, as old as I am, I can still change.

Alice Neel

#24. The place where I had freedom most was when I painted. I was completely and utterly myself.

Alice Neel

#25. from all other creatures. Jesus is called the monogenes, the "only begotten" of the Father. There is a sense in which Jesus and Jesus alone is begotten of the

R.C. Sproul

#26. Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

Alice Neel