Goya Quotes

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people.

Stevie Nicks

Birthday, Mom, Song

"A Three-Way with Stevies Williams, Nicks, and Wonder". Interview with Brayden Olson, www.vice.com. August 15, 2012.

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You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

Isaac Mizrahi

Artist, Cry, Knows

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In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
'suffering humanity

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

People, Humanity, Suffering

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1958). “A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems”, p.9, New Directions Publishing

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Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown.

Pablo Picasso

Greatness, Clown, Painter

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When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."

Simone de Beauvoir

Men, Hair, Two

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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Ralph Ellison

Art, Social, Protest

Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.8, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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Of course, the camera is a far more objective and trustworthy witness than a human being. We know that a Brueghel or Goya or James Ensor can have visions or hallucinations, but it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before its lens.

Hannah Hoch

Real, Vision, Lenses

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I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me.

Lebbeus Woods

Inspiration, Reading, Thinking

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In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.

Arthur Koestler

Errors, Political, Single Life

Arthur Koestler (1952). “Arrow in the blue: an autobiography”

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The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Clive Barker

Beautiful, Art, Eye

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It was my 16th birthday-my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do-write songs and sing them to people. [...] Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I'm back to being the poet I always thought I was.

Stevie Nicks

Mom, Song, Dad

"A Three-Way with Stevies Williams, Nicks, and Wonder". Interview with Brayden Olson, www.vice.com. August 15, 2012.

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To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

W. H. Auden

Art, Apples, Giving

1936 'Letter to Byron', pt.3, stanza 20, collected in Poems, Essays, Dramatic Writings 1927-1939 (1977).

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I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

Igor Stravinsky

Dream, Criticism, Rodents

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But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

Pablo Picasso

Artist, Vanity, Greed

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I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

John Berryman

Artist, Ideas, Achievement

"EM Forster's work tailed off once he finally had sex. Better that than a life of despair" by Sam Leith, www.theguardian.com. June 13, 2010.

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