Edgar Degas Quotes - Page 4

There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

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

One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement

The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

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.

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.

If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn't want anyone killed. I'd be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.

The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.

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

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.

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

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.

I don't admit that a woman draws that well!

It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.

These women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition... it is as though one were watching through a keyhole.

I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things.

There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.