Spanish author quotes Quotes

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

“Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”

“She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”

“There is no greater glory than to die for love.”

“Why assume that to look is to see?”

“Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.”

“Taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.”

“No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.”

“For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.”

“All things considered, there is only Matisse.”

“Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.”

“Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.”

“When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.”

“If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.”

“One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.”

“If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.”

“Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.”

“...they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.”

“The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.”

“It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.”

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

“and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.”

“It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.”

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”

“All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?”

“To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.”

“When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.”

“To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love...”

“opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .”

“For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”

“Courage is walking naked through a cannibal village”

“If I don't have red, I use blue.”

“[In developing your potential] ... I don't develop; I am”

“Children's lies are signs of great talent.”

“A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”

“The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.”

“I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things - they have to get along with one another.”

“Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.”

“I draw like other people bite their nails.”

“When I haven't any blue I use red.”

“From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.”

“I want to know one thing, what is color?”

“As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”

“Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.”

“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!”

“To find is the thing.”

“What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.”

“The beauty of America is that the average person always thinks she is above average.”

“Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.”