A Quote by Georges Braque

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

Georges Braque

Quote Topics

Describing Illusion Merely Painting Writing

Quote Author

Georges Braque
French - Artist
May 13, 1882 - August 31, 1963

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

W. S. Gilbert

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

Philip Guston

I'll continue on the path I've been taking, feet on the ground, describing people's lives, describing people's emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people.

Mo Yan

Painting should educate and enrich. Modern painting merely offers a split-second emotion: You see it, you have an instant reaction and move on. Instead, real painting can be looked at over and over again and each time it has something new.

Igor Babailov

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

A. S. Byatt

Painting comes to reality through illusion. An illusion that allows us to make a leap of faith; to believe. To believe in a blue that can be the wing of a bug or a thought. It makes our invisible visible.

Squeak Carnwath

Painting doesn't mean just describing; it's a state of spirit.

Caryl Churchill

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

David Sedaris

In 6,000 years of storytelling, [people have] gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls.

Joe Sabia

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

Langston Hughes

tend to be better at describing feelings and ideas, and worse at painting a picture of any physical thing. I have terrible spatial reasoning skills so even if I were describing my girlfriend, whom I see every day, it sound like I was talking about a child's drawing of her. "Very beautiful. Glasses. Brown hair. Super smart brain. Bigger than our dog. Smaller than me".

Josh Gondelman

When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.

Walter Darby Bannard

Nirvana is a word that means enlightenment, being beyond the illusion of birth and death, the illusion of pain, the illusion of love, the illusion of time and life.

Frederick Lenz

Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.