Edgar Degas Quotes

So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.

Another Visitor: How did you manage, Monsieur Degas, when you painted that plein air called 'Le Plage', the one Monsieur Rouart has? Degas: It was quite simple. I spread my flannel vest on the floor of the studio, and had the model sit on it. You see, the air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

C'est très bien de copier ce qu'on voit, c'est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l'on ne voit plus que dans son mémoire. C'est une transformation pendant laquelle l'ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c'est-à-dire le nécessaire.

Everybody has talent at
twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.

I really have some luggage in my head. If only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things here, there's a bale I should insure at once.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

I have seen some very beautiful things through my anger, and what consoles me a little, is that through my anger I do not stop looking...

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice.

..women... ...their way of observing, combining, sensing the way they dress. They compare a thousand of more visible things with one another than a man does.

What a pity we allowed ourselves to be called Impressionists.

We were created to look at one another, weren't we

It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see any more but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary.

I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.