My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.
Pablo PicassoRead
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creativity requires imagination and emotional expression beyond physical sight.
This quote by Picasso suggests that true artistic creation stems from an inner vision and a profound connection to one's emotions. By metaphorically closing one's eyes and singing, an artist immerses themselves in their imagination, allowing intuition and feeling to guide their work rather than merely relying on what they see in the external world.
Themes
ArtCreativityImaginationExpressionEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
An art class discussion on the imaginative process of creating.
More from Pablo Picasso
All quotes βPainting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo PicassoRead
In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
Pablo PicassoRead
He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
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You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
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I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.
Pablo PicassoRead
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I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art... If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.
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Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.
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Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.
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Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.
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