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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The past is edited so it always looks clearer to us. Today always looks a bit of a jumble.
Lucian Freud objected to the idea of his life being written on the grounds that ‘it is still going on’.
There is a dilemma here: the process of moving is exhausting and often tedious, but the experiences to be had at the destination may be exhilarating.
It’s the now that’s eternal.
Well, you need a few oddballs. That’s why you need lots of artists, and not just painters but all kinds. They look at life from another angle.
If the young can’t move in, cities die. That’s what happened to Paris: it got too expensive. In the great days, the young could move there from the provinces.
The cause of death is birth.
My French is very primitive, but when somebody asked me if it wasn’t a bit difficult living here in France not being able to communicate, I answered, ‘How do you mean? I’ve had three exhibitions here!’
Each time I do a still life, I get very excited and realize that there are a thousand things here I can see!
That is to say, if you do something that you are fitted for, that you love and are good at, success may (or may not) follow.
One of his insights was summed up in the phrase πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) or ‘everything flows’.
‘There’s no such thing as a copy, really. Everything is a translation of something else.’
In the manner of Jiro Ono, the sushi chef supreme, he just keeps on doing the same thing, continually fired by the urge to do it differently and better.
he has managed to find more and more in less and less.
