Edgar Degas

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. 

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it. 

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. 

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false. 

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. 

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters. 

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement. 

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. 

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. 

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists!One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

I should like to be famous and unknown.

Clint Eastwood

I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it.

I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

I've never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves - it's just a question of finding the subject.

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people's lives.

My old drama coach used to say, 'Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.

Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands.

The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

There's a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven't. You just do the best you can.

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.

We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has.

Salvadore Dali

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. 

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making. 

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid. 

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. 

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali. 

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. 

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait. 

I don't do drugs. I am drugs. 

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous. 

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. 

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning. 

Let my enemies devour each other. 

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory. 

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them. 

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Herbert Spenser

Government is essentially immoral. 

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom. 

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts. 

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances. 

Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations. 

Love is life's end, but never ending. Love is life's wealth, never spent, but ever spending. Love's life's reward, rewarded in rewarding. 

Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman. 

Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage". 

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit. 

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance. 

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it. 

All socialism involves slavery. 

An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature. 

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold. 

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity. 

Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.

James Cameron

I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father's respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things. 

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on. 

If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad. 

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with. 

It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group. 

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer. 

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee. 

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world. 

The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer. 

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.

I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football. 

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean. 

I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all. 

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.
worlds. 

 

Steve Martin

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. 

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't. 

Love is a promise delivered already broken. 

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. 

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that. 

Well, excuuuuuse me! 

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke. 

When your hobbies get in the way of your work - that's OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves... well.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night. 

An apology? Bah! Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be. 

Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything! 

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is. 

Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty. 

Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them. 

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town. 

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot. 

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness. 

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

Mick Jagger

A good thing never ends.

A lot of times songs are very much of a moment, that you just encapsulate. They come to you, you write them, you feel good that day, or bad that day.

Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

I am not a librarian of my own work. It's a good thing not to be too involved with what you have done.

I came into music just because I wanted the bread. It's true. I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted.

I can't get no satisfaction.

I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson. I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way.

I got nasty habits; I take tea at three.

I have never wanted to give up performing on stage, but one day the tours will be over.

I haven't had the time to plan returning to the scene because I haven't left it.

I must be careful not to get trapped in the past. That's why I tend to forget my songs.

I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, but how boring is that?

I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.

It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.

Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.
 

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Patriotism is an instant reaction that fades away when the war starts.

People get very thoughtful when they are in cars. I no longer care for cars. I don't collect them.

People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.

Pieter Zeeman

According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined.

Had we really succeeded therefore in altering the period of vibration, which Maxwell, as I have just noted, held to be impossible? Or was there some disturbing circumstances from one or more factors which distorted the result?

I count myself fortunate to be able to contribute to this work; and the great interest which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has shown in my work and the recognition that it has paid to my past successes, convince me that I am not on the wrong track.

I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation.

In the absence of a magnetic field the period of all these oscillations is the same. But as soon as the electron is exposed to the effect of a magnetic field, its motion changes.

It was not simply out of a spirit of contradiction that I exposed a light source to magnetic forces. The idea came to me during an investigation of the effect discovered by Kerr on light reflected by magnetic mirrors.

Moreover, photography has made it possible to fix these images and now provides us with a permanent record of each observed spectrum, which can be measured out at any time.

Nature gives us all, including Prof. Lorentz, surprises. It was very quickly found that there are many exceptions to the rule of splitting of the lines only into triplets.

Now all oscillatory movements of such an electron can be conceived of as being split up into force, and two circular oscillations perpendicular to this direction rotating in opposite directions.

Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest.

On the basis of Lorentz's theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron.

The magnetic cleavage of the spectral lines is dependent on the size of the charge of the electron, or, more accurately, on the ratio between the mass and the charge of the electron.

The rotation of the polarization plane is extraordinarily small in all gases, thus also in sodium vapour.

We studied the light source in the direction of the magnetic force, we perforated the poles of the magnet; but even in the direction of the magnetic lines of force we found that our result was confirmed.

Gore Vidal

A good deed never goes unpunished.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Shelby Foote

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.

Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

I never cared what kind of grade I got.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

I ran into Ku Klux Klan and the threat of hurricanes, and those two things made me decide not to build on the Alabama coast, so we came back to Memphis.

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Longevity conquers scandal every time.