Philip Guston Quotes

What is seen and called the picture is what remains - an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. ~ Philip Guston

If the artist starts evaluating himself, it's an enormous block, isn't it? ~ Philip Guston

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see. ~ Philip Guston

I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. ~ Philip Guston

There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover. ~ Philip Guston

Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible. ~ Philip Guston

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing. ~ Philip Guston

All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art - with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed ... ~ Philip Guston

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. ~ Philip Guston

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation. ~ Philip Guston

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue. ~ Philip Guston

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum. ~ Philip Guston

I go to the studio everyday because one day I may go and the Angel will be there. What if I don't go and the Angel comes? ~ Philip Guston

But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance. ~ Philip Guston

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point. ~ Philip Guston

Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another ... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing ... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation. ~ Philip Guston

Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics ... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out. ~ Philip Guston

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing. ~ Philip Guston

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand. ~ Philip Guston

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b. ~ Ariana Reines

I'm not interested in painting; I'm not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell am I interested in? I must be interested in this process. ~ Philip Guston

To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else ... ~ Philip Guston

Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint ... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living. ~ Philip Guston

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. ~ Philip Guston

The things I felt ... about certain painters of the past that ... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet ... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself ... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface ... That's truly ... the act of creation. ~ Philip Guston

Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. ~ Philip Guston

No good to paint in the head - what happens is what happens when you put the paint down - you can only hope that you are alert - ready - to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing - a being. Believe in this miracle - it is your only hope. To will this transformation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don't matter. They collapse anyway in front of the painting. ~ Philip Guston

More than a process, painting is being possessed ... ~ Philip Guston

We are image-makers and image-ridden ... We work until we vanish. ~ Philip Guston

That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm. ~ Philip Guston

It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. ~ Philip Guston

Do I really believe that? I make a mark, a few strokes, I argue with myself, not do I like or not, but is it true or not? Is that what I mean, is that what I want? ~ Philip Guston

Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe. ~ Philip K. Dick

Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards . . . helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next. - Albert Bandura20 ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! ~ Philip Roth

The phallic dignity, of a powerhouse of a warrior prince, is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins, ~ Philip Roth

Bullying is an evil because it not only destroys the life of the kid who's bullied, but also makes everyone in the class who knows this is going on feel guilty for not doing anything. ~ Philip Zimbardo

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense ~ Philip K. Dick

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way. ~ Philip Yancey

It is more important to do what is strategically right than what is immediately profitable. ~ Philip Kotler

In the end ... Stand where we feel led. Stand straight, stand tall, and try to remember that other folks might be led to stand elsewhere. ~ Philip Gulley

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, to bring back into our own heads -- the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one find in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, which is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead, and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane... ~ Philip K. Dick

Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
The tender alcoves built by love at night. ~ Philip Jose Farmer

The prime minister has chosen to acknowledge publicly the sovereignty of God and the claim of God on her life. Hers is the challenge to live up to that claim. ~ Philip Robinson

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter. ~ Philip Pullman

For the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the mind, English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world. ~ Philip Sidney

Less talk, please! Let's just do. ~ Philip Oyok

For more than thirty years, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd have been gardening with extraordinary, indeed legendary, results. Part memoir, part omnium-gatherum of horticultural wisdom and practical advice, Our Life in Gardens is at once literate, learned, sensible, and, often, sheer luscious poetry. There are delights to be sampled on every page. From a cultivated life, they have brought forth, once again, a cultivated book. ~ Philip Gambone

That goat," Rachael said. "You love the goat more than me. More than you love your wife, probably. First the goat, then your wife, then last of all - " She laughed merrily. "What can you do but laugh? ~ Philip K. Dick

My books are about killing God. ~ Philip Pullman

If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this. ~ Philip Roth

Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it. ~ Philip Roth

Guilt is useless. The world torments us, and we react by tormenting ourselves. I wonder how we can ever have such a low opinion of ourselves that we join in. ~ Philip K. Dick

When we put our keys down, we should be conscious of putting them down. When we pick them up, we should be conscious of picking them up. That's all there is to zen. ~ Philip Toshio Sudo

Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf. ~ Prince Philip

Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood; some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day...but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. ~ Philip K. Dick

I am going to fight - I, a socialist and Syndicalist - so that we shall make an end to war, so that the little ones of France will sleep in peace, and the women go without fear. ~ Philip Gibbs

Stuart Taylor, Jr., "The Bill to Combat Terrorism Doesn't Go Far Enough," National Journal 33 (2001): 3319. 17. 531 U.S. ~ Philip Bobbitt

Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction. ~ Philip K. Dick

A man is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and, in some degree, banish for that time all other objects from his thoughts. ~ Philip Dormer Stanhope

Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood. ~ Philip Larkin

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them. ~ Philip Pullman

Remember, this is the time of the cockatrice. It has hatched from its egg. So who now dares say what will be? ~ Philip Dodd