Francoise Gilot Quotes

#1. 'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#2. I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#3. I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#4. You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#5. It's ludicrous to even talk about (Marquis) de Sade, let alone indulge in all that, when people are being tortured and suffering for real, not for sexual games. I have no interest either in being a victim or in turning others into victims. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#6. For me, style is essentially doing things well. If you want to be outrageous, be outrageous with style. If you want to be restrained, be restrained with style. One can't specifically define style. It's like the perfume to a flower. It's a quality you can't analyze. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#7. Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents. #Quote by Pablo Picasso

#8. So how do you go about teaching them something new? By mixing what they know with what they don't know. Then, when they see vaguely in their fog something they recognize, they think, 'Ah, I know that.' And then it's just one more step to, 'Ah, I know the whole thing.' And their mind thrusts forward into the unknown and they begin to recognize what they didn't know before and they increase their powers of understanding. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#9. Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérese and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just offstage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all women he had collected in his private museum. But he didn't cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#10. We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything ... Everething there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#11. One day when I went to see him (Picasso), we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, 'Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I'm concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.'I told him I had often noticed in his dealings with others that he considered the rest of the world only little grains of dust. But I said, as it happened, I was a little grain of dust gifted with autonomous movement and who didn't therefore need a broom. I could go out by myself. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#12. Don't imagine you could ever take my place.' I told her I had never wanted to; I only wanted to occupy the one that was empty. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#13. Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#14. And you, you're an angel,' he said, scornfully, 'but an angel from a hot place. Since I'm the devil, that makes you one of my subjects. I think I'll brand you. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#15. Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it ... myself included. #Quote by Pablo Picasso

#16. No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#17. I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#18. What I like about the American woman is she usually has a lot of dynamism. In the U.S., women have a tendency to go forward, to be more exaggerated than in Europe. Many times the rough ideas come from the States, then they are refined in Europe. The American women and the French women are still the best-dressed. #Quote by Francoise Gilot

#19. Pleasure and pain, the good and the bad, are so intermixed that we can not shun the one without depriving ourselves of the other. #Quote by Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon

#20. For with the complete disappearance of my boredom, to which I had not dared to give a name, I had changed for the better. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#21. No one ever has time to examine himself honestly, and most people look no further than their neighbors' eyes, in which they may see their own reflection. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#22. ...happiness and misfortune,without worry, lively joy are completely normal feelings, on which we have total right and never get enough of, but they that blind us. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#23. Three-fourths of all marriages are unhappy. #Quote by Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon

#24. Striving to write and not succeed is the same as kissing without pleasure, drinking without getting drunk or travelling and never getting there. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#25. Off-the-rack solutions, like bargain basement dresses, never fit anymore. #Quote by Francoise Giroud

#26. I found myself both touched and irritated by the discovery that she was vulnerable. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#27. You never listen to me anymore. Before, if I was talking to you, you would always listen. But now you have no time to even talk to me.
'Yeah... Has Keaty told you not to eat the Stew?'
'Richard!'
I frowned 'What?'
'You are not listening to me!'
'… Oh. Well I'm sorry. I've got a lot on my mind.'
'Not me.'
'Huh?'
'I am not on your mind.'
'Uh... of course you are.'
'I am not' she poked me in the ribs. 'I think you do not love me anymore.'
I looked at her in astonishment '… Are you serious?'
'Very serious' she said petulantly
'But... I mean... do we have to talk about this right now?'
'Yes. It must be now. Etienne is not here, and maybe soon I will never see you agai...'
'Francoise!' I hissed. 'Keep it down!'
'Maybe I should keep it down but maybe I should not. In the dope field, when I would not be quiet, you pushed me to the ground and held me tightly'. She giggled. 'It was very exciting'. #Quote by Alex Garland

#28. Can someone be ,,better' than the other in love relationships, especially in those, in which emotional values replace all moral values? #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#29. All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and Francoise Minkowska in particular, together with those whom she has succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied the drawing of houses made by children, and even used them for testing. Indeed, the house-test has the advantage of welcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a house spontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil. To quote Anne Balif: "Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations." It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of its inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Mme. Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof.

If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been #Quote by Gaston Bachelard

#30. Marriage? It's like asparagus eaten with vinaigrette or hollandaise, a matter of taste but of no importance. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#31. What he does not yet understand is that whatever makes a woman strong is the reason that certain men will love her, even if behind her strengths there hide great weaknesses. This he will learn from You. He will learn that You are bubbly, funny, and sweet only because You have all Your weaknesses. But by then it will be too late. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#32. I feel happy and secure when I'm on my bed with a good book ... I forget everything which is terrible in our world. #Quote by Francoise Hardy

#33. I was thinking that I should be content to kiss him until the break of day. Bertrand ran out of kisses too soon; desire made them superfluous in his eyes. They were only a stage on the road to pleasure, not something inexhaustible and self-sufficient, as Luc had revealed them to me. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#34. Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#35. Possessing faith is not convenient. You still have to live it. #Quote by Francoise Mallet-Joris

#36. I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#37. Bread sets free; but does not necessarily set free for good ends
that dear illusion of so many generous hearts. It sets a man free to choose: it often sets free for the bad, but man has a right to that choice and to that evil, without which he is no longer a man. #Quote by Francoise Mallet-Joris

#38. There are so many dreams beyond our nights, and so much sunshine beyond our gray walls. But we can't see it when we stay at home. There is so much sky above our roof. Is the door so old that it won't open, or are we at home because we're afraid of catching a chill? #Quote by Francoise Hardy

#39. When man, Apollo man, rockets into space, it isn't in order to find his brother, I'm quite sure of that. It's to confirm that he hasn't any brothers. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#40. It's funny how fate, by introducing herself, loves to choose unworthy and mediocre faces #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#41. Craving itself, purely impure, must have future to sustain itself. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#42. When we dream about something like some immensely clear joy, we don't even notice little, but far more effective possibilities in which we could reach it #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#43. We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#44. ...everyone paints his life with his grand free moves, clearly and decisively. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#45. You can't help putting a lot of yourself into the image and when it's printed the reader can spend hours getting it out. #Quote by Francoise Mouly

#46. Living in the bush teaches you that life is a magnificent cycle of birth and death, and nothing showed me that more powerfully than when Nana gave birth to a beautiful baby boy around the time of Lawrence's passing.

Of course I named him Lolo. #Quote by Francoise Malby Anthony

#47. Indeed, woman can be a machine run wild, or a machine can be a better, more subjugated, and efficient woman. #Quote by Francoise Meltzer

#48. Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#49. For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#50. I've never drink so I could forget life, but to urge it. #Quote by Francoise Sagan

#51. Contempt is the only way to triumph over calumny. #Quote by Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon