The Whistler Quotes

#1. Nothing gets on other people's nerves at the office more than a whistler. And the sad part is, these whistlers don't know they're doing it. Someone should, tactfully, tell the whistler how much it disrupts the office environment.

Letitia Baldrige

#2. It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.

David S.Goyer

#3. The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.

James Whistler

#4. The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.

Tallulah Bankhead

#5. We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

James Whistler

#6. Then rang the war chime, the clang of steel on steel loud over Leavenheath, and there came into my heart again the longing to wipe out the memory of old defeats, and I gripped my axe and shield and waited for my turn to come.

Charles W. Whistler

#7. The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.

James Whistler

#8. As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

James Whistler

#9. Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway.

Glen Hirshberg

#10. A story is told that Whistler once painted a tiny picture of a spray of roses. The artistry involved in the picture was magnificent. Never before, it seemed, had the art of man been able to execute quite so deftly a reproduction of the art of nature.

Sterling W. Sill

#11. I would say a must-do in Canada would be to go skiing at Whistler in Vancouver. You could take a chair lift for, like, a half hour to the top of this mountain, and you ski down; it takes like so long to get to the bottom. You go past the clouds. It's absolutely incredible.

Sebastian Bach

#12. Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?

James Whistler

#13. He had shrewd, on the spot judgement about human nature. Good sense with good manners and the practice of contentment made up in his view a large part of wisdom.

Theresa Whistler

#14. A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

James Whistler

#15. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

James Whistler

#16. Fucking is for bathroom stalls and the back seat of a Toyota

Sage Whistler

#17. A search through Whistler's correspondence, now online at the University of Glasgow, paints a portrait of a relationship that at times was volatile, with Sickert swinging from sycophantic to offended and defensive. Whistler's

Patricia Cornwell

#18. Skiing in Whistler was great fun. It's an extreme environment that's very different to my own and I had never skied before, so I had to learn to take on the elements quite bravely. It was nice to try something new.

Hayley Atwell

#19. Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.

Douglas Adams

#20. Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.

James Whistler

#21. The scullery roof had sprung a leak: she put down a bowl to catch the drips, but the rainwater spread and darkened, to make treasure maps and Whistler nocturnes of the walls and ceiling.

Sarah Waters

#22. Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

James Whistler

#23. Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

James McNeill Whistler

#24. As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Oscar Wilde

#25. But there was escape, too, even in those days, for there was Whistler living in the grey mists with a faded orange moon. The nocturne transformed itself into dreamy rooms with Chopin's music creating a mood that softened the hard core of self.

Mark Tobey

#26. It is for the artist ... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

James Whistler

#27. Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.

James Whistler

#28. To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

James Whistler

#29. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

James Whistler

#30. A student of James McNeill Whistler tells the great artist, 'I tend to paint what I see.' Whistler replies, 'Ah! The shock will come when you see what you paint!

James Whistler

#31. I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

James Whistler

#32. The work of a master reeks not of the sweat of the brow - suggests no effort - and is finished from its beginning.

James Whistler