Top 100 Irving Stone Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Irving Stone

#1. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.

#2. 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.

Irving Stone

#3. A young lady went into a bookstore and asked the clerk for Irving Stone's book, "Immoral Wife." The title is "Immortal Wife," the clerk replied. "I'll get it for you." Oh, please don't bother, If that's the correct name of the book, I don't think I'd care for it. I had something else in mind.

James Keller

#4. Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

Irving Stone

#5. It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.

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#6. I do like to teach. Sitting in my great chair at school, I used to consider myself as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth ... To fire a newborn soul with ardor for learning! At that time I thought the world could afford no greater pleasure.' - Those Who Love, p. 177

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

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#8. I paint only what I love.
[Vincent Van Gogh]

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#9. [Vincent Van Gogh] 'Oh Theo, don't you think I'm the black sheep, do you?'
[Theo Van Gogh] 'I'm more inclined to consider you as an ass.'

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#10. A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.

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

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#12. There's no love without pain.

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

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#14. Inside yourself you're strong. That's the place where strength counts. Strength shows not only in how fast you can chop down trees.' -p. 5

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#15. Watercolor is not my way of expression.
[Vincent Van Gogh]

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#16. A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.

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#17. Perhaps you could not find such godless, such ruthless and such materialist people as clergy.

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#18. It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor.

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

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#20. I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.

Irving Stone

#21. To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

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#22. The biographical novel sets out to document this truth, for character is plot, character development is action, and character fulfillment is resolution.

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#23. His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap

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#24. Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.

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#25. 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.

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

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

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#28. Money makes the man a beast.

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

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#30. He had come into the autumn of his life: a man had his seasons, even as had the earth. Was the harvesting of autumn less important than the seeding of spring? Each without the other was meaningless.

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#31. 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.

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

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#33. Nature always resists the artist at the beginning.

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#34. An empty stomach is better than full and grief is better than happiness.

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

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#36. Artists thrive on suffering.

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#37. Actually, Paris wakes up when it comes time for aperitif.

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#38. 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.

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

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#40. As he reached the door of the chapel and turned back for a last look, he saw that the Virgin too was sad and lonely; the most alone human being God ever put on earth.

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#41. Wherever at least two art lovers meet, Vincent Van Gogh's name is holy.

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

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

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#44. He ... breathed in
heavy gulps of air to prove to himself that he was three-dimensional.

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

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#46. There is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris.

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

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#48. 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.

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#49. When I compare myself to the other fellows there is something stiff and awkward about me; I look as if I had been in prison for ten years.

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#50. From this vantage point he came to a realization that everything that had happened to him before this had been a journey upward through time, everything that occurred after it a descent. If he could not control his fate, why be born?

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#51. Indignation. Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

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#52. 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.

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#53. After all, the life itself shows a completely useless, hopeless and indifferent blank face, a deduction of no more than a blank canvas.
[Vincent Van Gogh]

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#54. Have you ever been in love?"
"...in a way."
"It's always 'in a way.

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#55. The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.

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#56. Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.

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#57. How difficult it is to be simple.

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#58. Art destroys the life.

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#59. From out of pain, beauty.

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#60. That horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

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

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#62. I wanted the figures to be real and believable so that you would feel that with their very next breath would begin life itself.

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#63. 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.

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#64. Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food ...

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

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#66. They had painted in a grand rush to keep intact the purity of their first impression, the mood in which the motif had been conceived.

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

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#68. I was thinking that Rembrandt would have like to paint you.

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

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

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

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#72. After all, the world is still great.

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#73. A person may paint or talk about painting but he cannot do both at the same time.

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

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

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#76. I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.

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#77. Who loves - lives, who lives - works, and who works has some bread.

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#78. I can not draw sheep and cows if I do not understand their lives.
[Vincent Van Gogh]

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

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#80. The simplest things that need self-restraint are the most difficult to replicate.

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

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#82. If Delacroix discovered painting when he had neither teeth nor health, I can discover it when I have neither teeth nor the mind.
[Vincent Van Gogh]

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#83. There seemed to be that same fierce quest after truth, the same unafraid penetration, the same feeling that character is beauty, no matter how sordid it may appear.

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#84. There's nothing romantic about my work ... I don't believe in inspiration. I believe that you get to your desk, you stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you write, and in the end, you write something good.

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#85. Time has a texture. Each period of waiting looms its own design. For Abigail, this one was shot through with golden threads. -Those Who Love, p. 130

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#86. An artist does not have to think about what he is doing.

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#87. Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.

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#88. Religion will never show the way.

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#89. No one has called any of my pictures obscene ever but I have been constantly blamed for an even greater sin - the ugliness.
[Vincent Van Gogh]

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#90. 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.

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

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#92. 'Tell me, please,' Van Gogh asked, 'is it justifiable that a person wastes his only life by selling worthless paintings for fools?

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

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

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#95. Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.

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