Irving Stone Quotes, Thoughts and Image

The best romance is inside marriage; the finest love stories come after the wedding, not before.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

How difficult it is to be simple.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink.

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

Life's not so bad after all. There are not only poison but also antidotes.

His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap

No artist is normal. Who happen to be normal cannot be an artist.

There are neither good nor evil, only the existence and action.

Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.

You cannot be firmly certain about anything. You can only have enough courage and strength to do what you consider to be right. Maybe it turns out that was wrong, but still you would have done his, and it is most important.

One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.

He had always loved God. In his darkest hours he cried out, "God did not create us to abandon us.

Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.

It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved. [Vincent Van Gogh]

It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?" "Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.

What we know of others is our personal secret.

The most perfect guide is nature. Continue without fail to draw something every day.

There's no love without pain.

There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before.

To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.

From out of pain, beauty.

Do not call yourself old. A man is as old as the creative force within him.

Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.

To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, "Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.

When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.

An artist would not rise above the mediocrity if he condemns it.

After all, the world is still great.

He who loves lives, he who lives works, and he who works has bread.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

...that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.

Every human life had its pattern that had to be worked out slowly to its ultimate conclusion.

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.