Top 100 Neel's Quotes
#1. Neel's model might match the store's volume but never its density
Robin Sloan
#2. 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
#3. No one ever pays to learn the most important things.
Neel Burton
#4. Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.
Neel Burton
#5. Neglecting small things under the pretext of wanting to accomplish large ones is the excuse of a coward.
Alexandra David-Neel
#6. Things are so different now that it feels they were all different people then, like characters you read about in a book, not the younger version of your own self.
Neel Mukherjee
#7. Pick up a camera and start shooting. You need to wade in in order to figure out how to move forward and do something concrete. I firmly believe that a lot dynamic and revolutionary work flows from those who summon all of their personal energy and just go out and make something.
Andrew Neel
#8. Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work.
Neel Mukherjee
#9. Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it.
Alice Neel
#10. 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
#11. Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.
Robin Sloan
#12. Nature has a language of its own, or maybe those who have lived long in solitude read in it their own unconscious inner feelings and mysterious foreknowledge.
Alexandra David-Neel
#13. When a book is going well, it tells you where to go.
Neel Mukherjee
#14. Let the prisoner go. She's not here for your amusement nor for your pleasure.
Neel Kay
#15. Drinking turns a fool into a merry fool.
Neel Burton
#16. I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.
Neel Mukherjee
#17. You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything.
Alice Neel
#18. The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy's head.
Neel Mukherjee
#19. I think there's a joy to be had in taking readers where they just don't want to go. If you are writing a properly realist novel, then don't blink. Why not see something for what it is and render it truthfully? I find it a good way of going about writing - not to blink.
Neel Mukherjee
#20. When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive.
Neel Burton
#21. If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.
Neel Burton
#22. The wise expect nothing, hope for nothing, thus avoiding all disappointment and anxiety.
Alexandra David-Neel
#23. Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image ... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment.
Neel Burton
#24. Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money.
Neel Burton
#25. all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself.
Neel Mukherjee
#26. I don't call myself an 'independent filmmaker'. Either a concept works within a studio system or it doesn't. If it does then you should try to get a studio budget so that you can use all of the tools they have to get what you want. If it doesn't then you look elsewhere, or make it yourself.
Andrew Neel
#27. Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.
Neel Mukherjee
#28. Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul.
Neel Mukherjee
#29. I can see the Milky Way. It's like the smudge of a cosmic giant's fingerprints on the inky black sky. And stars - so many millions and millions of them that, if I let my eyes unfocus for a bit, they too become a smear in the sky.
Neel Mukherjee
#30. As I get older it gets harder and harder to hold on to the ephemeral excitement. When a documentary, or a screenplay, or even just a brainstorming session is going well I get to experience sense of hope, and expansiveness, even if it's just for a moment.
Andrew Neel
#31. It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much.
Neel Mukherjee
#32. Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres.
Neel Mukherjee
#33. India introduced Britain to vegetarianism - see Tristram Stuart's excellent first book on this - and it is possible, indeed all too easy, to be a vegetarian in India and eat extraordinarily good, varied food every day, with very few 'repeats.'
Neel Mukherjee
#34. Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus abouth the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about?
Neel Mukherjee
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.
Elizabeth Neel
#38. One generation builds, the next generation consumes it to nothing; that is the abiding truth of life.
Neel Mukherjee
#39. What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.
Andrew Neel
#40. Very few of us are capable of being Free Thinkers, needing neither to adore nor to insult God, the insult often being an act of faith more profound than adoration.
Alexandra David-Neel
#41. When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was ... I thought art is art.
Alice Neel
#42. Being a Bengali, one is surprised when all the endless spume and froth of talk suddenly reveals itself to be the front of a gigantic wave of action.
Neel Mukherjee
#43. For all this, man is embodied and trusting in his senses; he had sooner believe in a sensible improbability than in an insensible uncertainty, that is, sooner worship an idol than grapple with the philosophers.
Neel Burton
#45. As so often in life, it is not a case of true and false, but of true and more true.
Neel Burton
#46. This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people's lives because your own is just empty, dead time.
Neel Mukherjee
#47. A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.
Neel Burton
#48. Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.
Neel Burton
#49. Work cannot convey the almost voluptuous sweetness of the feelings experienced ... in solitude.
Alexandra David-Neel
#50. I'm much more attracted to the miscegenation of cultures than to harmony.
Neel Mukherjee
#51. When you see something every day, it gets into your brain.
Elizabeth Neel
#52. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.
Neel Burton
#53. Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it ... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.
Elizabeth Neel
#54. Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.
Neel Burton
#55. It takes ten good decisions to make up for one disastrous one. This is why it is better not to make nine good decisions than to make one bad one - which is what happens most of the time.
Neel Burton
#56. Innocence is a pretty dangerous thing, you know. Revisit Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' or, for that matter, Greene's 'The Quiet American' to find out how destructive it can be.
Neel Mukherjee
#57. The place where I had freedom most was when I painted. I was completely and utterly myself.
Alice Neel
#59. There is a straight-forward definition for 'Independent Filmmaking'. The term references a group of films that are financed by money that comes from outside the studio system. In a literal sense that is what it means.
Andrew Neel
#60. Unlike 'mere' medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences.
Neel Burton
#61. Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.
Neel Burton
#62. The idea of discussing psychological and philosophical ideas in a visual medium was really exciting to me. I thought I was going to go into philosophy ... and suddenly I found this way to combine that with my love for visual mediums.
Andrew Neel
#63. The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.
Neel Burton
#65. A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.
Neel Burton
#66. So Sona does what he has perfected: he becomes two persons, an outer one that goes through the motions required of him, and an inner one that is the true, pure he.
Neel Mukherjee
#67. "To fashion stars out of dog dung, that is the Great Work. To take a negative experience and, by comparing it to something worse, make it feel good, is the great skill."
Alexandra David-Neel
#68. So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.
Robin Sloan
#69. It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.
Neel Burton
#70. Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.
Neel Burton
#71. I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that.
Neel Mukherjee
#72. In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help.
Neel Mukherjee
#73. Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.
Alice Neel
#74. Landscapes have a language of their own, expressing the soul of the things, lofty or humble, which constitute them, from the mighty peaks to the smallest of the tiny flowers hidden in the meadow's grass.
Alexandra David-Neel
#75. The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.
Neel Burton
#76. There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.
Neel Burton
#77. The two greatest warriors are Truth and Time. Be sure to march behind, and not against, them.
Neel Burton
#78. I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.
Alice Neel
#79. Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes.
Andrew Neel
#80. Philosophy is an act of seduction between one true lover and another, most often the philosopher and himself.
Neel Burton
#81. The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude.
Neel Burton
#82. 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
#83. The Naxalite revolution - an ultra-left Maoist movement - in Bengal, and elsewhere in India, in the late 1960s provides one strand of 'The Lives of Others.'
Neel Mukherjee
#84. Within minutes a small crowd had gathered: what could be more interesting than other people's lives?
Neel Mukherjee
#85. Work defines our lives and our place in the world.
Neel Mukherjee
#86. This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility.
Neel Mukherjee
#87. Remember that what seems zeitgeisty today is the cause of tomorrow's bafflement or, worse, ridicule.
Neel Mukherjee
#88. To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book.
Neel Mukherjee
#89. In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind.
Neel Burton
#90. Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.
Neel Burton
#91. When they reach what Sona assumes to be Ashish Roy's room, he notices that a hurricane lamp has been placed aleady on a wooden stool. It casts more shadows than it illuminates.
Neel Mukherjee
#92. You know it's very hard to maintain a theory in the face of life that comes crashing about you.
Alice Neel
#93. There is nothing truly serious in life. All words sound hollow when one listens to them carefully.
Alexandra David-Neel
#94. Lucky for me, as old as I am, I can still change.
Alice Neel
#95. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion.
Neel Burton
#96. The glut of information that is spayed at us on a daily basis is an important factor in the formation of our ideologies, and it's not even actually happening in front of us.
Andrew Neel
#97. When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce ... in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
Neel Burton
#98. When I eat, I always pick out the best parts in the middle and leave everything else on the side. It becomes a big sculptural mess, but there are nice compositional elements about how it all sits on the table.
Elizabeth Neel
#99. One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.
Neel Burton
#100. Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal.
Neel Burton
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