Talk:Edgar Degas

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• But it's true, isn't it Pauline, that people imagine that the artists and their models spend their time getting up to all sorts of obscenities? As far as work goes, well, they paint or sculpt when they are tired of enjoying themselves.

• Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

• Damn, and just when I was starting to get it!
  • Deathbed statement.

• Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

• Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.

• How awful it is not being able to see clearly any more! I have had to give up drawing and painting and for years now content myself with sculpture ... But if my eyesight continues to dim I won't even be able to model any more. What will I do with my days then?

• I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.
  • After a painting of his sold for a very high price (reported as $100,000) in an auction.

• I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.

• If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun.

• The moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.

• The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.

• Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.

• What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

• What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.