Quotes About Aubrey Beardsley

#1. I have one aim - the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.

Aubrey Beardsley

#2. Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know - that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

Daniel Gilbert

#3. [Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

Audrey Niffenegger

#4. Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

Elbert Hubbard

#5. What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

Aubrey Beardsley

#6. When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.

Aubrey Beardsley

#7. I'm two hours late when I pull in to the driveway. It won't matter that I'm always on time. People never see how good you are. Fuck up once, and it's like you are wearing a neon sign.

Corrine Jackson

#8. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing.

Aubrey Beardsley

#9. N MY early boyhood I was enraptured by the great fairytale illustrators of the period: Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Kay Nielsen. As a schoolboy, I was to discover Aubrey Beardsley, and I was extremely fond of an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with most imaginative drawings by Heath Robinson,

John Gielgud

#10. But - but in falling, we fly, don't we? We fly vertically. That's the paradox of vertical flight. Falling is the only way we can fly.

Emil Ostrovski

#11. Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash.

Aubrey Beardsley

#12. Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy ...

Oscar Wilde

#13. This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.
I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Probably," I say. "But then, what isn't?

Dan Simmons

#14. If you lined up everyone I've ever dated, you wouldn't see any similarities.

Lisa Marie Presley

#15. Things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them.

Aubrey Beardsley

#16. The signs were all there, all over, for anyone willing to notice.

Jay Asher

#17. I have always done my sketches, as people would say, for the fun of it ... I have worked to amuse myself, and if it has amused the public as well, so much the better for me.

Aubrey Beardsley

#18. In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

Aubrey Beardsley

#19. It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician.

Aubrey Beardsley

#20. How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did - sly dog!

Aubrey Beardsley

#21. The truth is, fish have very little sex life. If you have ever tried to make love under water, you will know why.

Ed Zern

#22. No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Aubrey Beardsley

#23. The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

Steve Hanke

#24. All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles.

Aubrey Beardsley