Vincent Van Gogh

‘My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.’

‘My sketch-book shows that I try to catch things in the act.’

‘Now, if you can forgive someone for immersing himself in pictures, perhaps you will also grant that the love of books is as sacred as that of Rembrandt, indeed, I believe that the two complement each other.’

‘A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.’

‘If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.’

‘Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.’

‘I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.’

‘There is no blue without yellow and without orange.’

‘We spend our whole lives in unconscious exercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words.’

Oscar Wilde

‘I never travel without my notebook. One always needs sensational exciting to read on the train.’

‘Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.’

‘Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.’

‘Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.’

‘Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.’

‘The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.’

Ernest Hemingway

‘My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.’

‘There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.’

‘There is no friend as loyal as a book.’

‘You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.’

‘There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.’

‘Never confuse movement with action.’

‘When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.’

‘For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. ‘

‘The writer’s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.’

‘The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.’

Pablo Picasso

‘Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.’

‘I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.’

‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’

‘Give me a museum and I’ll fill it. ‘

‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.’

‘Action is the foundational key to all success.’

‘All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.’

‘Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.’

‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ‘

‘Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.’

‘Everything you can imagine is real.’

‘He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.’

‘I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.’

‘If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.’

‘My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.’

‘Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.’

‘To draw you must close your eyes and sing.’ 

Henry Matisse

‘There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.’

‘A simple black rectangle with lined, squared, or blank pages, held by an elastic band, an inside pocket for loose sheets, a binding in ‘moleskine’ which gives it its name, this trusty pocket-size traveling companion guarded notes, stories, thoughts and impressions before they turned into the pages of beloved books.’

‘Creativity takes courage.’

‘An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.’

‘I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.’

‘There are always flowers for those who want to see them.’

‘Work cures everything.’

Bruce Chatwin 

‘Losing my passport was the least of my worries, losing a notebook was a catastrophe’.

‘…men have to learn to live without things.  Things fill men with fear: the more things they have, the more they have to fear.  Things have a way of riveting themselves on to the soul and then telling the soul what to do.’

Luis Sepulveda

‘Sat down on a wine barrel, in front of the sea, in some port of the south of the world, I am scribbling some notes on a genuine moleskine, a piece of art that Bruce [Chatwin] gave to me for this travel…’