Irving Stone

“We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.”

“I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.”

“He was a victim of his own integrity, which forced him to do his best, even when he would have preferred to do nothing at all.”

“My goal always is to tell a universal story, meaning it's about a person who has an idea, a vision, a dream, an ambition to make the world somewhat less chaotic.”

“He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.”

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?""Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.”

“The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.”

“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”

“I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.”

“In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.”

“I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.”

“There's nothing romantic about my work... I don't believe in inspiration. I believe that you get to your desk, you stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you write, and in the end, you write something good.”

“Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.”

“Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his own mind... This is where the novelist's creative imagination has to take over.”

“My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.”

“An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.”

“I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.”

“From this vantage point he came to a realization that everything that had happened to him before this had been a journey upward through time, everything that occurred after it a descent. If he could not control his fate, why be born?”

“The biographical novel sets out to document this truth, for character is plot, character development is action, and character fulfillment is resolution.”

“A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.”