Drawing Quotes

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“I wish I could draw you how I see you. I'd draw a boy with the most magnetic smile, and the kindest hands, and eyes that are gloomy, but can sometimes be bright. I'd draw a boy who deserves to see the ocean.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.”
― Beatrix Potter

“All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.”
― John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing

“But it is a pipe."
"No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.”
― Walt Stanchfield

“If a restaurant offers crayons, I always take them and color throughout the meal. It beats talking to the people I came to dinner with.”
― Stephan Pastis

“Just because I'm doing what I love, doesn't mean It's always going to be fun.”
― Tsubasa Yamaguchi

“Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“practice makes better”
― Brian Lies

“It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.”
― Victoria Kahler, Their Friend Scarlet

“We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"
I said nothing.
"What colour's a blackbird?" she said.
"Black"
"Typical!”
― David Almond, Skellig

“After a time, my hand had become as skilled as my eyes. So if I was drawing a very fine tree, it felt as if my hand was moving without me directly it. As I watched the pencil race across the page, I would look on it in amazement, as if the drawing were the proof of another presence, as if someone else had taken up residence in my body. As I marveled at his work aspiring to become his equal, another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches, the placement of mountains, the composition as a whole, reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper. My mind was at the tip of my pen, acting before I could think; at the same time it could survey what I had already done. This second line of perception, this ability to analyse my progress, was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and freedom. To step outside myself , to know the second person who had taken up residence inside me, was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper, like a boy sledding in the snow.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

“The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know - for comedians are the caricatures among us.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of
the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A
great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace
or probing authoritatively the unknown.
::: Brett Whiteley :::”
― Brett Whiteley

“I'm not talented at all. It's just that I spend more time thinking about art than others.”
― Tsubasa Yamaguchi

“I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Disney and I were a bad mix. For a year I was probably more depressed than I have ever been in my life. I worked for a great animator, Glenn Kean. He was nice, he was good to me, he's a really strong animator and he helped me. But he also kind of tortured me because I got all the cute fox scenes to draw, and I couldn't draw all those four-legged Disney foxes. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't even fake the Disney style. Mine looked like road kills.”
― Tim Burton, Burton on Burton

“... a fountain pen with a curious label: For finding dreams that don't exist yet.

Evangeline had been unable to resist trying the pen, and as soon as she did, a fledgling dream had taken form. She didn't know how long she'd spent drawing, only that when her piece was done, it felt like a picture of a promise. Evangeline and her love were at the end of a dock covered in candles, which made the ocean glow so that it looked like a sea of fallen stars. Only night and her moon watched. No one else was there, just Evangeline and her groom. Their foreheads were pressed together- and she might not have known exactly what they were doing if not for the words her pen had etched in to the sky. And then they will write their vows on their hands and place them over each other's chests, so they may sink in to their hearts, where they will be kept safe forever and always.”
― Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

“The sun is high, the day hot, and she lays the dress out in the grass to dry, sinks onto the slope besides it in her shift. They sit, side by side in silence, one a ghost of the other. And she realizes, looking down, that this is all she has.
A dress. A slip. A pair of stolen shoes.
Restless, she takes up a stick and begins to draw absent patterns in the silt along the bank. But every stroke she makes dissolves, the change too quick to be the river's doing. She draws a line, watches it begin to wash away before she even finishes the mark. Tries to write her name, but her hand stills, pinned under the same rock that held her tongue. She carves a deeper line, gouges out the sand, but it makes no difference, soon that groove is gone, too, and an angry sob escapes her throat as she casts the stick away.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I've always drawn cartoons, that's all I can do. If I didn't draw, I would probably be in a mental hospital.”
― R. Crumb, R. Crumb: Conversations by R. Crumb

“A leaf, large and rough, a thorny stalk, blue flower. I borage bring courage. Than a saw-toothed leaf. Lemon balm. Soothe all troublesome care. Marigold---cureth the trembling of harte. Perhaps their medicine will cross through the cell walls of my drawing hand.
The plants grow into a schematic, a garden, geometrically arranged. I consult the crackly herbals by my bed. Chamomile, catmint, sorrel. In Latin: Matricaria chamomilla, Nepeta X faassenii, Rumex acetosa. I get out of bed, retrieve my colored pencils, come back.
The smell of earth fills the room. Root and flower and loam. Decay and regeneration. Mullein and comfrey, costmary, feverfew, betony. I sink into the earth, below verbena and lavender, descending as I draw.”
― Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen

“Look, I get it, you can grow fond of characters as you're drawing them. They wind up becoming a part of you. But sometimes the story gets away from you, and circumstances start dictating the events. But to end a story...everything must be resolved...even if you must kill a character! If you're not willing to do that, you might as well quit now.”
― Alexandre Clérisse, Scattered Pages

“Art and craft classes are not just about creating something beautiful, they're about discovering the beauty within yourself.”
― TalentGum

“It's as though I can stop being me for just a moment, and I feel what it feels like... to be a vole. Or a rose. Or---"
She was going to say, "or you."
She wouldn't presume to know what it felt like to be him. But she thought of him on the pier, gloriously nude, stretching his arms toward the sky... and it had been as though his own pleasure in the moment had become her own pleasure. As if every bit of his pleasure, his abandon, his beauty, had infused her drawing.
"No," he said suddenly. Softly but firmly. As though he'd just had a revelation of his own.
"No?" She was crushed. And here she'd really given it some thought.
"No, I don't think you ever stop being you when you draw, Miss Makepeace... not even for a moment. I suspect you are entirely yourself when you draw.”
― Julie Anne Long, Beauty and the Spy

“Are you drawing?” I should specify my question. “Are you drawing me?” He just grins.

I groan, still very sleepy. “You know, for a serial killer, you’re pretty romantic.”
― Dolores Lane, Painting with Blood