Peggy Guggenheim Quotes

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day.

Peace was the one thing that Max (Ernst) needed in order to paint, and love was the one thing I needed in order to live. As neither of us gave the other what he most desired, our union was doomed to failure.

[When asked how many husbands she had had:] My own, or other people's?

I don't collect anymore. Everything is so terribly expensive. I don't see anything I like anyhow.

My mother's one idea was to sacrifice her life to her children and she had done nothing else since the death of my father. We wished that she had married again instead.

It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.

Venice is not only a city of fantasy and freedom. It is also a city of joy and pleasure.

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart.

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing.

I was much more interested in literature than I was in art. I just got into art by mistake.

I thought it would be nice to marry Virgil [Thomson] to have a musical background, but I never got far with the project.