Edgar Degas

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.

People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.

You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

I put it [picture "A still life of a pear" by Edouard Manet] there [on the wall, next to the picture "Jupiter and Thetis" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres], for a pear like that would overthrow any god.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. If then two or three natural accents can be added, obviously no harm is done. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.