50 quotes
You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.
Anyone would think paintings were made like speculations on the stock market, out of the frictions of ambitious young people... ...it sharpens the mind, but clouds your judgement.
A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.
I put it [a still life of a pear, made by Manet there [on the wall, next to Ingres' painting 'Jupiter'], for a pear like that would overthrow any god.
Apart from my heart, I feel everything grows old in me. Even my heart has something artificial. It has been sewn by the dancers in a soft, pink satin purse like their shoes.
Even working from nature you have to compose.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
We were created to look at one another, weren't we.
..women... ...their way of observing, combining, sensing the way they dress. They compare a thousand of more visible things with one another than a man does.
I really have some luggage in my head. If only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things here, there's a bale I should insure at once.
You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
I, marry? Oh, I could never bring myself to do it. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture.
Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927)
Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)
I should like to be famous and unknown.
I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament — temperament is the word — I know nothing.
In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I were all on the same road, the road from Holland [Dutch 17th century painters]