This book changed my life. No word of a lie. Picked it up off the street book dealer in the Annex for 2$. It is definitely priceless. Please read it.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909164-1,00.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/40122609
ON ART AND MONEY: “There can’t be any question of despising money. On the contrary, one’s painting has to bring it in. But one mustn’t paint the kind of pictures that bring it in.”
ON TASTE: “Never have people had so much taste as in the past twenty years, and never has the true creative spirit been so impoverished. It is in periods without taste, periods of vigor and simplicity, that art flourishes best.”
ON PAINTING IN GENERAL: “Bad painters never achieve a likeness because they reproduce exactly what they have before their eyes. Good painters achieve a likeness because they work like poets and when they contemplate the ocean, begin by seeing horses.”
ON ARTISTS AS UBERMENSCHEN: “We artists carry no tragedy within us, even if we are in despair and do away with ourselves … our minds stand back to watch us suffering and thereby mitigate the pain as it were, push our troubles into the background, transform them into a spectacle over which we can joke or philosophize.”
